"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 09 - Lost Dorsai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

LOST DORSAI

Copyright © 1980 by Gordon R. Dickson Afterword copyright ©1980 by Sandra Miesel Illustrations
copyright ©1980 by Fernando Fernandez

A shorter version of this work appeared in Destinies, Vol. II, no. 1; February-March 1980, copyright ©
1980 by Charter Communications, Inc.

The story “Warrior” first appeared in Analog, copyright 1965 by Conde Nast Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for
the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental.

An ACE Book

First Ace printing: August 1980 First Mass Market Printing: October 1981

246809753 Manufactured in the United States of America

LOST DORSAI

I am Corunna El Man.

I brought the little courier vessel down at last at the spaceport of Nahar City on Ceta, the large world
around Tau Ceti. I had made it from the Dorsai in six phase shifts to transport, to the stronghold of Gebel
Nahar, our Amanda Morgan—she whom they call the Second Amanda.

Normally I am far too senior in rank to act as a courier pilot. But I had been home on leave at the time.
The courier vessels owned by the Dorsai Cantons are too expensive to risk lightly, but the situation
re-quired a contracts expert at Nahar more swiftly than one could safety be gotten there. They had asked
me to take on the problem, and I had solved it by stretching the possibilities on each of the phase shifts,
coming here.

The risks I had taken had not seemed to bother Amanda. That was not surprising, since she was Dorsai.
But neither did she talk to me much on the trip; and that was a thing that had come to be, with me, a little
unusual.

For things had been different for me after Baunpore. In the massacre there following the siege, when the
North Freilanders finally overran the town, they cut up my face for the revenge of it; and they killed Else,
for no other reason than that she was my wife. There was nothing left of her then but incandescent gas,
dis-sipating throughout the universe; and since there could be no hope of a grave, nothing to come back
to,

nor any place where she could be remembered, I re-jected surgery then, and chose to wear my scars as
a memorial to her.

It was a decision I never regretted But it was true that with those scars came an alteration in the way