"Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 1 - Cosmonaut Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

at least, quite unnecessary.
Gregor eyed him covertly, admiring the machinelike ease with which the long
fingers sorted through the heaps; tangles ahead of them, neatly separated columns behind;
the butchering strength and surgical skill and clinical gentleness of thumb and claw and
palm. Then, answering some accurate intuition, the saur rocked back on his heels, washed
his hands in the last of the rain, and stood up with his part of the task complete.
Elizabeth and Gregor looked at each other across a diminished area of decking on
which nothing but stains and shreds of wrack remained. Elizabeth blinked wet lashes.
"Done," she said, standing up and shaking rain off her hat.
"Great." Gregor heaved himself upright and did likewise, joining the other two at
the stern rail. They leaned on it, gazing out at the reddening sky in which the god glowed
brighter. The highest clouds in the sky -- far higher than the squall-clouds -- shone with a
peculiar mother-of-pearl rainbow effect, a rare phenomenon that had even the sailors
murmuring in amazed appreciation.
Behind them the big sail came rattling down, and the engine coughed into life as
the steersman took them in toward the harbor. The cliffs of a hundred-meter-high
headland, crowned with a craggy castle, the Keep of Aird, rose on the port side; lower
green hills and fields spread out to starboard. Ahead the lights were coming on in
Kyohvic, the main port of the straggling seaboard republic known as the Heresiarchy of
Tain.
"Good work, Salasso," Gregor said. The saur turned and nodded gravely, his
nostrils and lips minutely twitching in his species' equivalent of a smile. Then the great
black eyes -- their sides easily visible in profile -- returned to scanning the sea.
Salasso's long arm and long forefinger pointed.
"Teuthys," he hissed.
"Where?" Elizabeth cried, delighted. Gregor shaded his eyes and stared along the
white wake and across the dark waves, so much of it there was, until he saw a darker
silhouette rise, humping out of the water about a mile away. For a moment, so it
remained, an islet in the deep.
"Could be just a whale--" he murmured.
"Teuthys," the saur insisted.
The hump sank back and then a vast shape shot out of the surface, rising in an
apparently impossible arc on a brief white jet; a glimpse of splayed tentacles behind the
black wedge of the thing, then a huge splash as it planed back into the water. It did it
again, and this time it wasn't black -- in its airborne second it glowed and flashed with
flickering color. And it wasn't alone -- another kraken had joined it. They leaped together,
again and then again, twisting and sporting. With a final synchronized leap that lasted
two seconds, and a multicolored flare that lit the water like fireworks, the display ended.
"Oh, gods above," Elizabeth breathed. The saur's mouth was a little black O, and
his body trembled. Gregor stared at where the krakens had played, awed but wondering.
That they were playing he was certain, without knowing why. There were theories that
such gratuitous expenditures of energy by krakens were some kind of mating display, or
even ritual, but like most biologists Gregor regarded such hypotheses as beneath
consideration.
"Architeuthys extraterrestris sapiens," he said slowly. "Masters of the galaxy.
Having fun."
The saur's black tongue flickered, then his lips once more became a thin line.
"We do not know," he said, his words perhaps weightier, to Gregor, than he
intended. But the man chose to treat them lightly, leaning out and sharing an aching,
helpless grin with the woman.