"Mouse - a novelette by John Grant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant John)

recollections were muzzy; his visual memory had never been up to much, and
at the moment all the pictures in his mind kept crumpling out of existence
before they'd properly formed. But he knew that it must have been a woman
behind him -- he could tell as much from the sound of her voice as she
worked on his foot. Bandaging it, as she'd said. She must have applied a
tourniquet around his knee, or perhaps she was just pressing down on the
blood-vessel with her thumb.
He permitted himself a moan.
"That's better," said the invisible woman. "Keep it at that level."
"Who are you?" he said.
"Qinefer."
For a few moments the name made no sense. Then he put it together with an
image. He was conscious of the fact that his mind was working very slowly.
The trouble was that she didn't look much like Qinefers usually did.
Qinefer -- she was the woman whom somehow no one ever looked at all that
often. She had a habit, when crossing a room, of following the line of the
walls, as if afraid to expose herself to the open space in the middle. She
had mid-length, curly black hair -- that was the first thing he
remembered. Yes, and a broad face that managed, despite its breadth, to
convey the impression of delicate construction. The only thing that
distinguished her was that, anachronistically, she wore spectacles; these
intensified the darkness and depth of her eyes while at the same time
drawing attention to the prim nakedness of the folds at the outer corners.
Small breasts, hardly discernible under her blue uniform shirt; you tended
to notice things like breasts on a long flight. Some of the other men on
the mission had called her Mouse, because of the way she was so quiet. So
self-deprecating. That was probably why he'd hardly registered her
presence except for the one time he'd thought about her breasts. Just the
one time, which said a lot in itself.
"Mouse," he said, then wished he hadn't.
"Yes."
She was a biochemist; the information popped into his mind. More came. The
earlier expedition to the star called Embrace-of-the-Forest had reported
that, astonishingly, there was a deal of evidence indicating that,
millennia before, the planet closest to the dim red dwarf had given birth
to what had become an advanced civilization. That life could emerge at all
on a world where the surface temperature was so low had been something of
a surprise; that the miserly radiation from its star, so sluggishly devoid
of high-energy particles, could have caused sufficient genetic mutation to
create a sophisticated lifeform within the known lifetime of the universe
was so startling that the exobiologists were still revising their
theories. Meanwhile, the rest of the scientists were trying to puzzle out
why the creatures of Starveling, as the world had been named, had
disappeared, because now the planet was manifestly barren of all but the
most primitive forms of animal life. What people tried not to speculate
about too publicly for fear of a blasphemy charge was the possibility that
this might have been the home of the Forgotten, the vanished race whose
technological feats were evidenced throughout the Galaxy by constructions
great and small, from hand-sized gadgets whose purposes were too often
inscrutable up to the artificial worlds that floated between the suns.