"Engines Of Light - 01 - Cosmonaut Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Gregor ordered pints for himself and Elizabeth, and a tall billican of hot fish-stock for Salasso. As he waited for the stout to settle and the thin soup to be brought back to the boil, he found himself worrying again about the unerring aim that so often connected his foot with his mouth. The awkwardness, he was sure, came not from the difference between the sexes but from the perhaps greater communicative gulf of class. Elizabeth Harkness was of predominantly local descent, albeit of good family, some of whose members were prominent in the Scoffer heresiarchy; his own ancestry, give or take a good deal of exogamy with the locals, came from the Bright Star's crew.
From the bar's mirror behind the bottles his own face scrutinized him: the same thin nose and grim mouth and long black hair swept back from a high hairline that he'd seen in generations of portraits. He felt their presence like a weight on his back.
"That'll be five shillings, Greg."
"Oh!" He blinked and shook his head; with that slight start recognizing the barmaid as Andrea Peden, one of the undergraduate students whose work he'd occasionally supervised. Her rippling auburn hair was loose on her shoulders rather than tied back, and he'd only ever seen her in a lab overall, but still. "Uh, thanks, Peden. And, let's see, an ounce of hemp as well, please." Alcohol was not a saur vice -- it was a physiological difference; they assimilated it without intoxication -- but hemp had definitely taken with the species, centuries ago.
"Another sixpence, then," the girl said. She glanced around. "And we're off-study, so first names, okay, Greg?"
"Ah, sure, Andrea, thanks."
He just knew that if he commented on her working here it would come across as yet another clumsy reminder of the difference between his economic status and that of most other students, so he forbore.
Back at the table he raised his glass soberly to Elizabeth as Salasso nodded almost imperceptibly at both of them and took from a thigh pocket a thin aluminum tube and a long-stemmed bone pipe, its bowl elaborately carved. The saur sucked up fish-stock through the tube and began filling the pipe from the paper twist.
"Hah!" he sighed after a minute, his mouth opening, snakelike, suprisingly wide and showing little fangs. Gregor winced slightly at the momentary waft of carnivore breath. A thin brass rectangle appeared between Salasso's long fingers like a conjuring trick, and he applied its faint flame to the tamped hemp and puffed. "Hah! That's better!"
"Any idea where the ship's from?" Elizabeth asked, as though Gregor might know. But it was Salasso who answered.
"Nova Babylonia," he said, and inhaled on the pipe. His lashless eyelids made a rare blink, and his third eyelid -- the nictitating membrane -- was flickering more rapidly than usual. "Of the fleet of the family Tenebre." His voice was reedy and harsh. He passed the pipe to Elizabeth.
"Recognize it, do you?" she asked, puffing for politeness' sake.
Gregor was a little disappointed by her seizing on this point. To hell with how the saur knew about it, the ship's origin was what mattered. Ships from Nova Babylonia were rare. From his twenty years, he could recall two such visits.
"Yesss," said Salasso, leaning his narrow shoulders against the seat's tall back. He drew on the metal straw again, hot colors briefly flowing in the gray-green skin of his cheeks. "I have seen that ship ... many times."
Elizabeth gave Gregor a skeptical look as she handed over the pipe. Gregor returned her a warning glance and just nodded at Salasso, keeping his face carefully expressionless as he sucked the last vile embers of the hemp. He tapped them out on the floor and began refilling the pipe.
"So you might know some of the shore crew?" he asked.
Salasso's shoulders lifted. "It is very possible. If so, I'll find out when I go to the reception at the castle." His great eyes closed for a moment. "Of the family Tenebre, perhaps a few. The human generations pass."
Gregor struck a match on his boot and relit, the cannabis rush roaring in his ears like a burn in spate. He heard Elizabeth's light laugh.
"This I have to see!" she said. "For this, I would come to your party as I am, rags and holes and boots and all!"
"Yeah, you do that," he said warmly. "Come as a scientist."
"Oh, thanks," said Elizabeth indignantly, then giggled. Gregor returned the pipe to the saur, who smoked the rest of it but said no more, his body still, his mind gliding into a typically saurian trance. The two humans watched in silence for a couple of minutes, supping at their pints until the pipe clattered from Salasso's fingers onto the table.
Gregor leaned across and stroked the dry, warm skin of the saur's face. No response was forthcoming.
"He's offline," he remarked.
"Another pint while we wait?" Elizabeth asked.
"Aye, thanks."
No time, or a long time, seemed to pass before she returned.
"Do you think he meant that literally?" she asked, as he settled in again. The saur's head, its great eyes still open, suddenly lolled sideways against her shoulder. She patted it. "Well, that's me here for the duration!"
"About twenty minutes, I reckon," Gregor said abstractedly. "Urn, how could he not have meant it literally?"
Elizabeth leaned forward on one elbow, careful not to disturb Salasso, gazing with what seemed like half-stoned fixity into Gre-gor's eyes. "You know. Metaphorically. Might be that their families, or lines, or whatever, know each other from way back." She laughed. "Do you really think our friend here is that old? He doesn't act like it."
"We all know the saurs live a long time."
"Supposedly."
Gregor looked straight back at her, narrow-eyed. "The saurs say it, and I've no reason to doubt it."
Elizabeth nodded slowly. "Aye, well, sometimes I wonder if the saurs are ... ancient people. That they are what people become, if they live long enough."
Gregor laughed. "It's a nice idea. But the saurs, they're obviously reptilian -- or saurian, if you want to be exact!"
"And so? The reptilian genes could still be in us, and only expressed much later in life than people normally live."
"You might have a point there," Gregor conceded, not entertaining the idea for a second. "Nobody's ever seen a saur dissected, after all, or even a picture of a saur skeleton."
He shook the last of the crumbled leaf into Salasso's ornate pipe. That moment when saurs got well and truly whacked by the hemp was the only time they'd open up for a few seconds, and they'd let slip weird things then. But that might just be the drug talking.
"Has anyone ever asked for one?" Elizabeth wondered aloud.
Gregor shook his head. "And I'll lay good money Salasso won't answer any questions we ask him when he comes back to the land of the living."
"Hmm, I wouldn't even try. He'd be touchy about it."
"There you go."
This was an old subject. The saurs' individualism and prickly sense of privacy made humans look like some kind of garrulous, gossiping animal that hunted in packs. They might all look the same to a casual or hostile eye -- though here, Gregor had found, familiarity made their distinctions apparent -- but their personalities were unpredictably diverse. The few traits they shared included a ravenous thirst for knowledge and a great reluctance to divulge any. Their language, their sexuality, their social relationships, their politics and philosophies -- if any -- were as mysterious as they must have been to the first terrified savage they'd encountered, many millennia back in humanity's history.
"Well," Gregor said, lighting up, "the least we can do is smoke the last of his weed. He sure won't be needing it."
"Hmm." Elizabeth puffed quickly and returned the pipe. "No more for me, thanks. I want to keep my head clear to write up some notes."
Gods in orbit, his colleague was beginning to look attractive as her merry eyes stared with fathomless pupils into his mind, even though her face and frame were a little more ... angular than he usually took to in a woman. That girl Peden at the bar -- now, she was quite something ...
Elizabeth laughed, and Gregor had a sudden suspicion, sobering as a cold wave over the deck, that he'd actually said what he'd just been thinking ... but no, his dry lips were still stuck to the stem of the pipe.
He licked his lips, overcome by another effect of the weed: sudden hunger. "What?"
"The way you look, Gregor, I wouldn't advise you to bother writing any notes tonight. They won't make much sense in the morning."
Her voice, or the vibration of her laughter, made Salasso stir and sit abruptly upright, blinking hard and looking around. Elizabeth stroked his hand, lightly grasped Gregor's for a moment of what he took to be stoned affection, and rose.
"Good night, chaps," she said, and was gone before Gregor could ask her if she had any plans to eat.