"Julian May - Rampart Worlds 1 - Perseus Spur" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90113

ISBN 0-345-39510-7

Manufactured in the United States of America

First American Edition: July 1999

10 987654321
 Chapter 1

It's a given: if the Hundred Concerns are determined to destroy you, fighting back is hopeless.
But I was a proud and pigheaded man. I never doubted that I'd be vindicated, because justice and
righteousness were on my side; so I fought. And of course I lost.
When my final appeal to the Interstellar Commerce Secretariat disciplinary tribunal was
denied and I was Thrown Away, some important part of my personality shattered, plunging me
beyond despair into a deadly apathy. My marriage to Joanna DeVet had ended, and I'd managed
to alienate most of my family, my few remaining friends, and the handful of colleagues at the
Secretariat who had stood by me during the scandal. I had no money left, no possibility of
earning an honest livelihood, and as a Throwaway, I was eligible for only the most meager public
assistance. My spiritless inertia made even the obvious solution impossible.
Finally, the only one who ever believed that I was not guilty as charged, my older sister Eve,
offered to pay my passage to a planet in the Perseus Spur, a perfect T-i world where subsistence
living was feasible and human predation at a minimum. I said: Why not? It made sense for me to
keep decently out of the way until I found the courage to do what most people seemed to expect
of me.
Improbably, I kept on living. Odder still, justice and righteousness did ultimately prevail. It
took a while.
But I'm still convinced that the Hundred Concerns would never have come tumbling down,
changing the course of human civilization in our galaxy and defeating the Haluk invasion, if the
sea monster hadn't eaten my house.
—
The aftermath of a big storm had left the skies of Kedge-Lockaby overcast and windy that
morning, hiding the comets and turning the normally gin-clear waters of the Brillig Reef murky
with stirred-up sediment. The five sport divers who had hired me and Pernio, my aging
submersible, for a holo-cam outing were noisily disappointed. Their names were Clive Leighton,
Mario Volta, Oleg Bransky, Toku Matsudo, and Bron Elgar. They were a demanding and
uncongenial bunch, a referral from an expensive hotel on the Big Beach.
All of them were fit and under forty. All were outfitted with the most sophisticated and
expensive cameras and diving gear. All except the one named Bron (who was very quiet and in
some indefinable way seemed to be the leader of the pack) were charter members of the "been
there, done that" club of smartasses. Clive, Mario, Oleg, and Toku described themselves curtly as
Rampart Starcorp executives, and I assumed that close-mouthed Bron was another one, perhaps
their boss. Even under the best of circumstances the quintet would have been difficult. On a
below-par diving day like that one promised to be, they were a total shuck.
My first mate, Kofi Rutherford, and I worked our buns off trying to please, but we bombed
every time. We led a tour through the famous castle corals with their normally hilarious mome
rath colonies—and the damned critters sulked in their holes. We moved on to my guaranteed
crowd pleaser, the underwater forest of multicolored slithy toves—but their beauty was dimmed