"Lackey, Mercedes - Born To Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Tannim pulled into a parking place so abruptly that Sam was taken by surprise; cutting in right under the fender of a departing vehicle, and neatly getting the Mustang worked into the slot so quickly it seemed as magical as the car-horse. As the young man shut the engine off, he turned to grin at Sam. “You've got to be quick around here,” he said. “Parking places go fast, and the god of parking has a short attention span.”
To his surprise, since Tannim hadn't mentioned specifically where they were going, the young man led the way into one of those Irish pubs Sam had been eyeing. And to Sam's great delight, once inside, the place proved to be real Irish, not “tourist” Irish. It looked—and felt—homey and lived-in. There was a small stage in the restaurant section, against one wall, with a folk-group setting up on it, whose instrumental mix Sam also noted with approval. He liked mixing the old with the new, although one could do some quite amazing things with traditional instruments. One of his most cherished memories was of being in a club in Tennessee and hearing the Battlefield Band performing “Stairway to Heaven” on the bagpipes. . . .
Still, although he was prepared to spend several delightful hours here, this did not look like the kind of place that would suit his companion. Young Tannim looked as if he'd never encountered an acoustic guitar in his life; a rock'n'roller to the core. The Clannad tape notwithstanding, he couldn't imagine Tannim caring for any music that didn't come with amps and megawattage. It was to Sam's considerable astonishment that the lady bartender greeted his escort by name, and asked if he wanted “his usual table.” At Tannim's nod, the lady waved them on, telling them that “Julie” would be with them in a minute.
As Sam took his place across from Tannim, he realized that, once again, he was going to have to realign all his previous ideas about the lad. And that was a discovery just as pleasant as the existence of this pub.

“Well,” Tannim said, when the waitress had brought them both drinks, “ready for a little more business?”
Another surprise for Sam—not the question, but the drink. Tannim had stuck to pure cola. He was young enough to take delight in drinking because he could. Interesting.
“I think so,” Sam replied cautiously. “You gave me a lot of information last night, but it was all in pieces. I'd like more of a whole picture.”
“Fine,” Tannim said agreeably. “Where would you like me to start?”
“With magic.” Sam took a deep breath. “Just what is it? How does it work? What can you do with it—and what's it got to do with racing—”
Tannim held up a hand. “The discipline people call 'magic' is a way of describing an inborn talent that's been trained. It has rules, and it obeys the laws of physics. It uses the energy produced by all living things; it also uses the energy of magnetic fields, of sunlight, and a lot of other sources. It's a tool, a way of manipulating energies; that's the first thing you have to remember. It's not good or bad, it just is. Like, I can use a crowbar to bash your head in, or to pry a victim out of a wreck.” He shrugged. “It's a tool; just a tool and nothing more. Some people have the skill to use the tool, some don't.”
Sam nodded, since Tannim looked as if he was waiting for a response. “But—how does it work? And who has it? Can anyone work it if they've got the knowledge?”
Tannim chuckled. “Hard to describe, Sam. First of all, you have to be able to see the energies in the first place, or at least know that they're there. That's the key; if you can see them, you can learn to manipulate them with magic—which is basically a way of making your own will into that tool to manipulate energy.” He licked his lips. “Here's where it gets complicated. If you've trained your will well enough, you can still use the energies without seeing them. Everyone could use some kind of magic, if they had the training—but most folks never come in touch with what they can use. Know anything more now than you did before I said that?”
Sam shook his head, ruefully. “Well . . . no. Not really. But I can believe in plasma physics without knowing exactly how it works. I suppose I can believe in magic too. So long as it follows rules.”
“That's the spirit!” Tannim applauded. “Now, what Keighvin won't tell you, because like most elves, he's an arrogant sonuvabanshee, is that humans were applying magic to cars before the elves thought of it. A lot of times they didn't realize that was what they were doing, but a lot of times they knew exactly what they were doing, especially on the racing circuit. So when the elves came on the scene, they got a bit of a shock, because there were humans out there already, using magicked cars. That's when they decided it might be a good idea to try and join up with some of those humans.” He spread his hands. “Voila—SERRA was born.”
“But why racing?” Sam asked, still bewildered. “For the Sidhe, I mean. It seems so—foreign to what they are.”
“Boredom,” Tannim replied succinctly, tracing little patterns on the wooden tabletop with his finger “They live—if not forever, damn near. But here's something else they won't tell you. The one thing they lack is creativity as near as I can figure. Every bit of their culture, with the sole exception of who and what they worship, comes from humans.” He looked up through his lashes, as if he were sharing a secret “They can replicate what we do, and even improve on it, but I've never once seen one of them come up with something new and original. So they depend on us to bring new things to their culture; as far as I can tell, that's always been the case. They were bored, and racing gave them a chance to bring back some excitement to their lives, like the old combat-challenges used to give them. Brought them that element of risk back—” his face sobered “—'cause, Sam, if you mess up on the track, sometimes it's permanent, and sometimes it's terminal.”
Sam wondered if Tannim's game leg was evidence of the boy's own brush with just that.
“But they won't admit it, even if you confront 'em,” Tannim said, with a crooked smile, making a figure eight. “That's the real reason they got into racing though, I promise you. Now as to why Keighvin took it farther, to where Fairgrove is trying to make mundane money—he's not lying, he wants to have that kind of mundane cash to kind of fix things for kids. I've got a hunch he wants to set up some safe-houses for abused kids that we can't take Underhill, starting here in Savannah. All elves have this thing about kids; Keighvin has it harder than most. If he could save every kid in the world from pain, hunger, fear—he'd do it. But he can't do it magically, not anymore.” Tannim made a complex symbol that looked suspiciously like a baseball diamond. “For one thing, there's too much Cold Iron around for his magics to work down here in the cities.”
“Huh.” Sam nodded, but he had reservations. Not that he hadn't heard about all the supposed abused kids, on everything from Oprah to prime-time TV dramas, but he wasn't sure he believed the stories. Kids made things up, when they thought they were in for deserved punishment. Hell, one of the young guys at work had shown up with a story about his kid getting into something he was told to leave alone in a store, breaking it, then launching into screams of “don't beat me, Mommy!” when the mother descended like a fury. Embarrassed the blazes out of her, especially since the worst she'd ever delivered in the kid's life was a couple of smacks on the bottom. Turned out the brat had seen a dramatized crime-recreation show the night before, with an abused-kid episode. Sam was beginning to think that a lot of those “beaten kids” had seen similar shows, then had been coached by attorneys, “child advocates,” or the “non-abusing spouse.” Wasn't that how the Salem witch-trials had happened, anyway? A bunch of kids getting back at the adults they didn't like?
As for the runaways—they'd had a solution for that back when he was a kid. Truant officers with the power to confine a kid, and reform school for the kids that couldn't toe the line at home. Maybe that's what they needed these days, not “safe-houses.”
But just as he was about to say that, he took a second, harder look at Tannim, and thought back about what Keighvin had said. Tannim might be almost a kid himself, but he didn't look as if he was easily tricked. And Keighvin had known what was happening to Sam—and presumably Sam's great-uncle—by supernatural means. It wasn't likely that they were being tricked. . . .
They, the elves, had been right about Sam's great-uncle. And who could say what might have happened if Keighvin hadn't intervened that night, so long ago. Would John Kelly have come to his senses before he'd done more than frighten Sam? Or would the beatings have continued, getting worse with every incident, until Sam turned into a sullen, trouble-making creature like Jack McGee, with his hand against every man alive, and every man's hand against him? Jack's father was the mainstay of the town pub . . . Jack's mother a timid thing that never spoke above a whisper, and always with one eye out for her husband, wore high collars and long sleeves, and generally bore a healing bruise somewhere on her face or neck. Now Sam was forced to confront that memory, he wondered, as he had not, then. What did those sleeves and collars conceal?
Maybe the stories were true; maybe the elves were right. . . .
Glory be. Am I thinking as if they're real?
He was. Somewhere along the line, he'd accepted all this—magic, elves, all of it. He might just as well accept the abused kids as well. . . .
“Have you people cast some kind of spell on me?” he demanded. “Made me believe in you? Brainwashed me?”
Tannim laughed. “If we used magic to make you believe in magic, to brainwash you, doesn't that mean magic works?”
Well, the boy had him there.
“I suppose you could have brainwashed me some other way,” Sam said, feebly.
Tannim shrugged. “Why?” he replied reasonably, as the waitress brought another round. “What's the point? By definition, someone who's been brainwashed is operating at less than his optimum reasoning capacity. Why would we want you brainwashed, when what we want is for you to be at your sharpest?” Tannim took a sip of his cola, and looked up at Sam from under a raised eyebrow. “Are you having second thoughts about all this, about agreeing to help Keighvin?” he asked. “If you are, Sam, it's nothing to be ashamed of. We need you, but not at the expense of forcing you to make a bargain you regret.”
Sam sighed. “No. No. It's just that I find myself believing in the impossible, and it doesn't seem right, all my brave words about plasma physics to the contrary.”
The young man took a moment to finish his drink before answering. “Sam,” he said, slowly, gazing off into nothing for a moment, “when you were a kid, people said it was impossible for a plane to fly past the speed of sound, for polio and smallpox to be eradicated, for the atom to be split, for a man to walk on the moon. I don't know what's impossible. All I can say is that 'impossible' just seems to mean that nobody's done it yet. There's some people that still don't believe a man walked on the moon. And there's people who still believe the earth is flat. Nobody puts their names in the history books. I know it all seems fantastic, but we are based in reality. It's just a bigger reality than most people are used to dealing with.”
“What do you know?” Sam found himself asking, his own meal forgotten for the moment. “You, who's magicked his car, who walks and talks with the Folk and treats them like mortals—what do you know?”
Tannim grinned. “Well—I know your beer's getting flat.”
Sam laughed, and gave in.
Tannim finished his third cola with one eye on Sam, and another on the crowd. On the whole, the evening had gone well. Sam had weathered both his initial exposure and the period of doubt that always followed it in good form. Better than Tannim had expected, in fact. Of course, he'd had a dose of the Folk as a child; that tended to leave a lasting impression.
Sam had finally worked himself round to asking specific questions about the elves, and how they were functioning in the human world. And why.
The crowd-noise around them was not too loud for them to be able to talk in normal voices—or at least, it wasn't after Tannim did a little local sound-filtering around their table, a tiny exercise in human magic that was worth the energy he expended on it. “Well, this is something else Keighvin won't admit unless he's pressed. Essentially, the Seleighe Court is split,” he said. “One group thinks they should all withdraw Underhill, and leave the world we know to the humans. The other group thinks that would be a major mistake.”
“Why?” Sam wanted to know, his head turned to one side.
“Remember what I told you about them, that they can't seem to create anything?” Tannim reminded him. “Keighvin thinks that if they withdraw, they'll stagnate. That's something a little more serious to them than it is to humans. They call it Dreaming; they can be forced into it by caffeine addiction, or they can drop into it from lack of stimulation, and being cut off from their old energy sources by Cold Iron. That's happened to one group in California already. They managed to get out of it, but—it wasn't pretty.”
He didn't like to think about that. They had all been damned lucky to pull out of their trap. And they wouldn't have been able to without the aid of humans.
He pulled his thoughts away; Elfhame Sundescending was all right now, and thriving. “Like the old story of the Lotus-Eaters; they lose all ambition and do next to nothing, sit around and listen to music and let their magic servants tend to everything, dance, and never think a single thought. Scary. I've seen it once, and I wouldn't wish it even on the Folk who'd be pleased to see me six feet under. Keighvin's got some plans to keep it from happening on this coast, and they involve all of us in Fairgrove.”
Just then, his attention was caught by someone that didn't fit with the usual Kevin Barry's crowd. She was clearly underage; he guessed round about thirteen or fourteen. Fifteen, max, but he doubted it. She was tarted up like a bargain-basement Madonna in black-lace spandex tights, a black-lace skirt, and a cheap black corset; wearing entirely too much makeup, so that her eyes looked like black holes in her pale face, with a bad bleach-job that made her hair look like so much spiky dead straw. What in hell was she doing here? This didn't look like her kind of crowd. God, she looks like Pris from Bladerunner, he thought.
But then, Sam had been surprised that he was a regular here. Maybe she just liked the music.
“I can see that, and I can see why racing, now,” Sam said, in answer to whatever he'd just told the man. “But what are they doing about Cold Iron? That's what drove them out of the Old Country, isn't it? Doesn't it bother them now?”
“How much real iron and steel do you see nowadays?” Tannim countered, raising his eyebrows. “Plastic, fiberglass, aluminum, yes—but iron?”
“Hmm. You have a point.”
The girl had worked herself in towards the stage, with a look of utter fascination on her face. Tannim felt a twinge of sympathy; he remembered the first time he encountered really good Celtic folk-rock. It had been right here—and this band, Terra Nova. Kind of like having your first experience of pizza being Chicago deep-dish. And it wasn't often that the old members of Terra Nova got back together again for an old-time's-sake gig, what with Trish being so busy at the restaurant and all. No wonder this chick had shown up. Yeah, it looked like she was just a punker with Celtic-rock leanings. Too bad she was so young. This was supposed to be an adult club, what with the bar and all. She could get bounced in no time, if she got herself noticed.
Well, if she behaved herself, they'd probably leave her alone.