"Elgin,.Suzette.Haden.-.Star.Anchored.Star.Angered" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

When he came to, he was in a small room, sitting in a chair facing the five of them. Plus a woman in the uniform of a Federation Outpost Marshal. His tattoos were all in place, the restraining net was gone, and his mouth tasted of swamp gas.
"Citizen Jones," asked the Marshal courteously, "are you sufficiently awake to view the evidence against you?"
"I need some air," said Coyote crossly, "You apparently include injections of swampwater in your hospitable welcomes to this garden planet."
The Marshal nodded to the others. "We'll go out on the balcony," she said. "It's logical that he should feel the need of fresh air. Citizen Jones, do not try to escape, or we will be forced to give you another of those ... swampwater ... injections."
"I wouldn't think of it, Citizen Marshal," Coyote cooed. "Besides, I wouldn't want to miss the view from your balcony. What is it, waterfalls?"
It was of course tundra, bordered by swamp, and a long line of square lumpy dwellings and buildings strung out along a pale green road, but they said nothing. No doubt if you were a Citizen of Galoralon, you quickly became immune to slurs on your homeworld's physical beauty.
"Please sit down, Citizen Jones," said the Marshal. "And you, Citizens."
"May I speak, Citizen Marshal?" demanded Coyote.
"Offworld dog, be silent!" bellowed one of the men, and Coyote looked at him in genuine astonishment. Even in the antiquated threedies he'd seen while waiting in the landing pattern for Phoenix-One, there'd been nobody with the nerve to say "offworld dog."
"It is you who will be silent, Citizen Hupp," said the Marshal crisply. "The offworld Citizen may speak."
"I would like to know precisely what I'm charged with," said Coyote, "and on what ridiculous basis, and then I would like to get on with my mission."
"The charge," she told him, "is inciting revolution. The basis is anything but ridiculous."
She pointed to the man on her right, saying, "Evidence, please, Gordeyn," and the man slapped a flat packet smartly into her outstretched hand.
"This was found hidden inside the lining of your guitar case, Citizen Jones," said the Marshal. "Examine it, please."
He did, shaking the contents out and shuffling through them rapidly. It was an appallingly amateur array of junk. The kind of thing you might get if you sent off for a "Junior Secret Agent Kit." There was a microcassette labeled "Nomads of the Swamps, Arise Against Your Tormentors!" There was a cheap machine for making duplicates of the cassette. There were negatives of some revolutionary posters. There was a bad map of the swamps of Krausse, there was a detailed—and pitiful—scenario laying out his alleged plans for fomenting this revolution. And there was a packet of lapel buttons reading WHIP INIQUITY NOW.
Coyote stared mournfully at this assortment of trivia, and then at the Marshal, who informed him that the case seemed swamp-gas tight to her.
"At this very moment," said Citizen Hupp ominously from his Marshal's side, tugging at the lapels of his bolero, "the nomadic peoples of Krausse, some half a million strong, are gathering in the swamps that encircle this beautiful city." He waved his arms in an enormous circle. "At this very moment," he repeated, "they come by the hundreds of thousands to celebrate their traditional Festival of the Seventh Year. And if we had not learned of the wicked, vicious, despicable plot against us, if we had not, I say, come to find out, by the merest, the most fortuitous chance, that—"
Coyote waited for an open space to come along in the man's tirade, and then he asked casually, "Is an offworld woman named Drussa Silver leading this horde of nomads, by any chance?"
Hupp's completely blank expression provided him the answer he had expected, and the rest of the man's ravings were drowned out by the pounding of blood in his ears.
In the first place, he'd been had. Nobody but good old Dean Shandalynne O'Halloran, his friendly neighborhood briefer, with her abstracts and her tattoos and her expert advice about how simple everything would be, had sufficient power to pull off a thing like this. He had been royally, imperially, pontifically had. And now he was supposed to be dragged off to jail, where he would sit for months, if he was lucky, and years, if he wasn't. While the TGIS tried to negotiate diplomatically for his release, all the while denying that they had ever heard of him. He was supposed to be pretty helpless, of course, so far as the Dean was concerned, since she had no knowledge of the particular skill that had gotten him stuck in TGIS to begin with.
In the second place, somebody had taken a laser, or a knife—god-forbid-and-fend, a knife!—or who knew?—on this place, perhaps a pointed stick?—and had torn up his guitar case. Coyote didn't like that. That guitar case was a museum piece, an irreplaceable antique lavender-plush-lined museum piece, and while he didn't mind people looking at it, or touching it, the thought of somebody slashing into its heart and hiding things there made his beard stand on end. The idea of somebody slashing in there to get the things back out was unbearable.
And in the third—and most important—place, his pride had been done an injury from which he was not sure it would recover. The idea that he, Coyote Jones, strongest projective telepath in three galaxies, a man able to control rioting thousands at a distance of damn near a mile, had come here to start a revolution with lapel buttons! Why not say he'd planned next to fly out over the swamps dropping paper leaflets out the window in little plastic envelopes? It was past bearing, and he didn't intend to bear it.
If he had not been so totally enraged, he might have thought twice about what he did next. If he had not just happened to know that the administration of Galoralon was indeed corrupt and wicked and soundly deserving of overthrow, he might have hesitated. If he had not been someone who firmly believed that not all good things must be totally devoid of laughter, he might have waited a bit. But none of those factors happened to be relevant here, and he didn't consider them for a second.
Instead, he leaned forward a little, took a deep breath, and projected. At full strength, in all directions, and with the greatest of joy:
PEOPLE OF GALORALON!
PEOPLE OF THE PALE GREEN SWAMPS!
PEOPLE OF THE TWINING SNAKES, LIMPID AMONG THE TREES!
FLOWER OF THE GALORALON OUTLANDS, OH BEARERS OF DESTINY, I CALL ON YOU!
THE TIME HAS COME ... TO THROW OFF THE CHAINS OF OPPRESSION!
THE TIME HAS COME ... TO RISE AGAINST YOUR WICKED MASTERS!
HOW LONG, O PEOPLE OF THE MIRE AND OF THE SCENTED MIASMAS, WILL YOU TOLERATE THE BRUTAL FOOLS WHOSE HEELS ARE SET UPON YOUR PROSTRATE THROATS? HOW LONG, HOW LONG? ARE YOU HUMAN BEINGS, OR ARE YOU SLIME MOLDS?
COME DOWN INTO THE CITY, O NOBLE PEOPLE OF THE SWAMPS, AND CUT DOWN THE DOGS WHO DARE TO SIT IN THE SEATS OF GOVERNMENT THAT ARE RIGHTFULLY YOURS AND YOURS ALONE! HAVE NO FEAR, THERE ARE ONLY A HANDFUL OF THEM!
O PEOPLE OF GALORALON, O NOBLE NOMAD PEOPLE, ARISE!
THE PRESIDENT IS A FOOL AND A WEAKLING, DRUNK HALF THE TIME AND DRUGGED THE REST, HE CANNOT STAND AGAINST YOU! HIS MEN ARE FOOLS AND WEAKLINGS LIKE HIM, COME FORWARD AND CUT THEM DOWN!
A SWAMP-NOMAD SHALL SIT IN THE PRESIDENT'S CHAIR AND WRITE AT THE PRESIDENT'S DESK! HURRAH!
A SWAMP-NOMAD SHALL WEAR THE ELEVEN-POINTED STAR OF JUSTICE AND THE GRAY RIBBON OF IMPERIAL PURITY! HURRAH!
O NOBLE PEOPLE, O NOBLE NOMADS, HARKEN TO ME!
ETC., ETC.
He had a wonderful time. The longer it went on, the more he warmed to it, and by the time the first wave of them came over the balcony rail, he was really enjoying himself. After all, he'd put down more riots than he could count, but this was the first one he'd ever started.
He went up on the roof to avoid the crush, and stuck around long enough, projecting encouraging words and sustaining songs, to see the President being carried away trussed up in vines like a pig, and a pallid greenish nomad sitting behind the Presidential desk with a stylus in his hand, drafting a State-of-the-Planet Message. Then he headed for the port and his flyer, pausing only long enough to snatch up his satchel and his guitar. He left his mutilated guitar case behind.
The roar from the city behind him as he took off was a source of great satisfaction to him. He wished only that the Dean could hear it, too.

Chapter Four
The definition of the word "lie" has nothing to do with the word "truth," which is not its antonym. A sequence of words can be defined as a "truth" or as a "lie" only in terms of the degree to which it achieves the purpose for which it was intended.
—Manual of the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, p. 1.6

He was a man of some importance. He was called The Fish, for his coldness of blood. Chief of the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service most of his adult life, he had at his disposal at all times three hundred fifty hand-picked operatives with very special skills, and a maintenance staff of two hundred live persons, seven thousand Fedrobots, and three Central-computer terminals.
He could order people killed. He could manipulate the internal affairs of entire countries. He could make the top officials of continents tremble, by a chance word casually dropped. It was therefore interesting that the arrival of a message saying that Citizen Dean Shandalynne O'Halloran of Multiversity Two was waiting to see him made him want to hide under his desk.
He had just decided to instruct the Amanuensis Mark IV to advise the Dean that he was out, when the din coming from his outer office reached a frightening intensity and the panic-button glowed red on his comset's office panel, throwing open the communicator to let him hear just what was really going on.