"Andre Norton - Ross Murdock 02 - Uncharted Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

satisfy their demonic master. Only we had been jumped by the tavern crowd,
probably only too glad to see a choice which had not included one of them.
Vondar had died from a knife thrust and I had been hunted down the byways of
that dark city, to claim sanctuary in the hold of another of their grisly
godlings. From there I had, I thought, paid my way for escape on a Free
Trader. But I had only taken a wide stride from a stinking morass into a
bush fire--since my rise into space had started me on a series of adventures
so wild that, had another recited them to me, I would have thought them the
product of fash-smoke breathing, or something he had heard from a story
tape. Suffice it that I was set adrift in space itself, along with a
companion whose entrance into my time and space was as weird as his looks.
He was born rightly enough, in the proper manner, out of a ship's cat. Only
his father was a black stone, or at least several men trained to observe the
unusual would state that. Eet and I had been drawn by the zero stone--the
zero stone! One might well term that the seed of all disorder!
I had seen it first in my father's hands--dull, lifeless, set in a great
ring meant to be worn over the bulk of a space glove. It had been found on
the body of an alien on an unknown asteroid. And how long dead its suited
owner was might be anyone's guess--up to and including a million years on
the average planet. That it had a secret, my father knew, and its
fascination held him. In fact, he died to keep it as a threatening heritage
for me. It was the zero stone on my own gloved hand which had drawn me, and
Eet, through empty space to a drifting derelict which might or might not
have been the very ship its dead owner had once known. And from that a
lifeboat had taken us to a world of forest and ruins, where, to keep our
secret and our lives, we had fought both the Thieves' Guild (which my father
must have defied, though he had once been a respected member of its upper
circles) and the Patrol. Eet had found one cache of the zero stones. By
chance we both stumbled on another. And that one was weird enough to make a
man remember it for the rest of his days, for it had been carefully laid up
in a temporary tomb, shared by the bodies of more than one species of alien,
as if intended to pay their passage home to distant and unknown planets of
origin. And we knew part of their secret. Zero stones had the power to boost
any energy they contacted, and they would also home on their fellows,
activating such in turn. But that the planet we had landed upon by chance
was the source of the stones, Eet denied. We used the caches for bargaining,
not with the Guild, but with the Patrol, and we came out of the deal with
credits for a ship of our own, plus--very sourly given--clean records and
our freedom to go as we willed. Our ship was Eet's suggestion. Eet, a
creature I could crush in my two hands (sometimes I thought that solution
was an excellent one for me), had an invisible presence which towered higher
than any Veep I had ever met. In part, his feline mother had shaped him,
though I sometimes speculated as to whether his physical appearance did not
continue to change subtly. He was furred, though his tail carried only a
ridge of that covering down it. But his feet were bare-skinned and his
forepaws were small hands which he could use to purposes which proved them
more akin to my palms and fingers than a feline's paws. His ears were small
and set close to his head, his body elongated and sinuous. But it was his
mind, not the body he informed me had been "made" for him, which counted.
Not only was he telepathic, but the knowledge which abode in his memory, and