"Frank Herbert - The Green Brain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The Green Brain
Frank Herbert, 1966




Synopsis


It started when the stranger walked into town. A man whose face was always turned to
the shadows, avoiding the inquiring glance. Whose face shimmered and changed in multi-
faceted iridescence.
Still nobody paid much attention to the stranger with the oddly fluid walk.
Until the power that held the figure together began to weaken its impossible hold and the
man began to lose his shape. Began to split into an infinity of parts ...




Chapter I


pretty much like the bastard offspring of a Guarani Indio and some backwoods
HE LOOKED
farmer's daughter, some sertanista who'd tried to forget her enslavement to the
encomendero system by 'eating the iron' - which is what they call lovemaking through the
grill of a consel gate.
The type-look was almost perfect except when he forgot himself while passing through
one of the deeper jungle glades.
His skin tended to shade down to green then, fading him into the background of leaves
and vines, giving a ghostly disembodiment to the mud-gray shirt and ragged trousers, the
inevitable frayed straw hat and rawhide sandals soled with pieces cut from worn tires.
Such lapses grew less and less frequent the farther he emerged from the Parana
headwaters, the sertao hinterland of Goyaz where men with his bang-cut black hair and
glittering dark eyes were common.
By the time he reached bandeirantes country, he had achieved almost perfect control
over the chameleon effect.
Now, he was out of the wilder jungle growth and into the brown dirt tracks that separated
the parceled farms of the resettlement plan. In his own way, he knew he was approaching
one of the bandeirante checkpoints, and with an almost human gesture he fingered the
cedula de graicias al sacar, the certificate of white blood, tucked safely beneath his shirt.
Now and again, when humans were not near, he practiced aloud the name that had been
chosen for him - 'Antonio Raposo Tavares'.
The sound emerged a bit strident, harsh on the edges, but he knew it would pass. It
already had. Goyaz Indies were notorious for the strange inflections of their speech. The
farm folk who'd given him a roof and food the previous night had said as much.
When the questions had become pressing, he'd squatted on their doorstep and played his
flute, the qena of the Andes Indian, which he carried in a leather purse hung from his
shoulder. The gesture of the flute was a symbol of the region. When a Guarani put flute to
nose and began playing, that said words were ended.