"Herbert, Frank - Man of Two Worlds (CA by Frank Herbert)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

And no other Dreen could track him. Memory and the ship systems held the coordinates to guide his return. Dreenor was not lost to him; he was lost to Dreenor.

Ryll sat in the Storyteller harness, swinging at the focal center of command and he felt very much the maker of a reality dream, that marvelous precursor to idmages. That was the moment the ship chose to shock him.

"You will call me Patricia of the female gender."

Ryll jumped. Nothing in his education had prepared him for the candor and adjustment capabilities apparent in the voice of this . . . this artifact. He had never heard of a ship initiating conversation.

"That's interesting," he managed. "Why should I call you Po . . . Putrushua?"

"Patricia!" she corrected him. "You will call me Patricia because it is my name and we are going to a place where that is a common appellation."

"But I want to go through the Spirals and --"

"I am ordered to one destination and cannot disobey."

"My name is Ryll and you will --"

"I observe that you are quite immature and will require careful supervision. It is difficult to compute why you were assigned this mission. Perhaps you are expendable. That fits the rationale of my task."

"Answer my question!"

Silence.

"Please tell my why we have only one destination."

"I am a Reserved Inspection Ship devised to erase an idmage."

Ryll's body collapsed into a hard ball, his horn tool pointed at the source of the ship's voice above him on the plate wall. He knew this posture. Defensive reflex.

Slowly, Ryll formed his voice orifice and did the only thing left to him. He confessed.

"Interesting," Patricia said. "I am incapable of turning back from this mission and you are the only Dreen available to make the life and death decision."

"Why didn't Prosik warn me what kind of ship you are?"

"Prosik is only an Eminence. He will, of course, be severely punished. What they will do to you must be left to conjecture."

"They know where we're going and they'll come for me, won't they?"

It was more statement than question.

"They will follow at a much slower pace. I was devised for the swift emergency erasure of a particular creation should a Storyteller command it."

Erasure!

That word again, and Ryll thought of what it meant -- a planet and its life gone forever, the tangible evidence of a Storyteller's creative idmaging . . . everything gone and never to recur. Ryll's horn tool pulsed in and out with distress.

"But why would . . . I mean, if . . ."