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

More silence, then: "Very well, sir. Will comply."

I really messed up, Ryll thought.

He closed his eyes and began sorting through newly acquired memories.

What a jumble! Important data, though. The Earther ship employed a primitive form of Dreen drive. We collided because the crude thing inherently homed on the signal of my incoming ship. Stupid! Stupid!

What happened to Patricia? Is my perfect ship destroyed forever?

Why, oh why did I take that ship?

Lutt Junior assumed command of their flesh and Ryll sank into his own thoughts with a sense of relief.

In school they had said the Dreen partner in this amalgam might have difficulty withdrawing completely but could be dominant by choice, taking over muscle and nerve control at any time. That was reassuring.

He felt the litter being lifted and carried somewhere.

Patricia, what is happening to you?

It had been so easy to take the ship. Too easy. The chief monitor at the Flat during Ryll's sixteenth year out of seedhouse, an Eminence named Prosik, had shown flexions and tremblings characteristic of bazeel addiction. Prosik had other defects, all of them adding up to sufficient reason for his never having risen above the position of Eminence, nineteenth from the bottom of Habiba's fifty-seven social varieties. He often slept during guard duty and even when awake accompanied the curious child into the ship for play at being a Storyteller.

If he hadn't been asleep I never would have acquired the flight-simulation manuals.

Despite the present mess, Ryll still felt proud of the way he had taken the ship. He had raised the impossible-to-idmage bazeel in a small experimental horticultural garden off his bedroom, hiding the prohibited plant under broad-leaved herbs. His parents, admiring the garden, never suspected.

Ryll had tried the bazeel once and awakened the next morning with a severe brainache and little memory of its effect except for vague visions of extruding all four legs and falling asleep while counting them over and over.

Periodically, Ryll presented small stems of bazeel to Prosik and, one day, gave the Eminence a large frond of the drug "to thank you for letting me play in the beautiful ship."

Shortly after consuming the bazeel, Prosik's horn-tool extension sank into the brown mass of his body until it lay almost buried there and the chief monitor was a comatose lump of protoplasm. He did not stir as Ryll crept into the ship, gaze fixed on the icy yellow light shining from the control room.

At last! He was in a Storyteller's sanctum and he possessed the knowledge to command an Excursion Ship.

Around Ryll lay an ovoid enclosure seven times his height and so wide even his longest extensions could not span it. He touched the first command plate and a silver-yellow glow filled the space with an exciting lambent radiance.

Ryll stared at the controls. This was the light that signaled life-creating forces. So I have the necessary powers.

One could never be sure until touching that plate in the command space and this had been forbidden to a mere child.

For a moment he felt fearful of the life patterns that might emerge from this place and he dawdled while sealing the external hatches.

Hesitation passed. He formed the proper pseudopod, touched the proper plates in proper sequence and exactly as the flight simulator had predicted, he found himself and the ship in the infinite Spirals of tangled space.

Elation filled him.

I've done it!

Sensors displayed what lay outside -- the substance of creation bathed in a light very like that within the Storyteller sanctum. Out there stood the most exciting mystery of all -- the raw material from which Dreen idmaging produced new places and new life. He had touched the control plate and filled his mind with awareness of the Spirals. Now . . . now he could idmage something important!