"Andre Norton - Dipple 2 - Janus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

well destroy them; their identity disks . . .
"These go to the Director--afterwards. But there's this." Naill balanced in his hand Duan Renfro's
master's ring. "Sell it--and see . . . she has flowers . . . she loves flowers . . . trees . . . the growing things
. . ."
"I'll do it, boy."
Somehow he was certain Mara would. The water was steaming now. Naill measured a portion into a
cup, added the powder from the tube. Together they lifted Malani's head, coaxed her to swallow.
Naill again nestled one of the wasted hands against his cheek, but his eyes were for the faint curve of
smile on those blue lips. A tinge of happiness spread like a gossamer veil over the jutting of the
cheekbones, the sharp angles of chin and jaw. No more moaning--just now and then a whisper of a
word or a name. Some he knew, some were strange, out of a past he had not shared. Malani was a girl
again, back on her home world of shallow seas beaded with rings and circles of islands, where tall trees
rustled in the soft breeze that always came in late spring. Willingly she had traded that for life on a ship,
following Duan Renfro out into the reaches of space, marrying a man who had called no world, but a
ship, home.
"Be happy." Naill put down her hand. He had given her all he had left to give, this last retracing--past
care, sorrow, and the unforgivable present--into her treasured past.
"You there--you Naill Renfro?"
The man in the doorway wore the badged tunic of the Labor Agency, a stunner swung well to the
fore at his belt. He was a typical hustler--one of the guards prepared to see the catch on board the
waiting transport.
"I'm coming." Naill gently adjusted the blanket, got to his feet. He had to go fast, not looking back,
never looking back now. But he halted to rap on Mara's door.
"I'm going," he told her. "You will watch?"
"I'll watch. And I'll do all the rest--just like you'd want it. Good luck, boy!" But it was plain that she
thought that last a wasted wish.
Naill walked for the last time down the hall, trying to make his mind a blank, or at least hold to the
thought that Malani was out of the Dipple in another way, a far better way. The guard gathered up two
more charges and delivered them all at the processing section of the port. Naill submitted without
question to the procedure that would turn him from a living, breathing man into a helpless piece of cargo,
valuable enough once it was delivered intact and revived. But what he carried with him into the sleep of
the frozen was the memory of that shadowy smile he had seen on his mother's face.
How long that voyage lasted, what path it took among the stars, and for what purpose, Naill was
never to know, or really care. Janus must be a frontier world, or else human labor would not be
necessary there. But that was the sum total of his knowledge concerning it. And he was not awake to see
the huge dark green ball grow on the pilot's vision plate, develop wide continents and narrow seas--the
land choked with the dense green of forests, vast virgin forests that more civilized planets had long since
forgotten existed.
The spaceport on which the cargo vessel landed was a stretch of bare rockland, scarred and
darkened by the years of fiery lashing from arriving and departing ships. And extending irregularly from
that center were the clearings made by the settlers.
Garths had been hacked out of the forest, bare spots in the dark green. The green carried a hint of
gray, as if some of the wide leaves of those giant trees had been powdered with a film of silver. Men
cleared fields, setting disciplined rows of their own plants criss-crossing those holdings, with the logs of
the forest hollowed, split, and otherwise forced into serving as shelters for the men who had downed
them.
This was a war between man and tree, with here a runner of vine, there a thrust of bush, or a sprout
of sapling tonguing out to threaten a painfully cleared space. Always the forest waited . . . and so did that
which was within the forest . . .
The men who fought that battle were grim, silent, as iron-tough as the trees, and stubborn as