"Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Chu shrugged. "It's instructive, anyway."
"Oh, go ahead," the bureaucrat said. "As long as it doesn't take too long."
Chu opened a cage and lifted out a rainbird. "Thank you." With a gesture, he dimmed the windows,
suffusing the lounge with twilight. "I open my act with this illusion. Thusly:"
He bowed deeply and swept out a hand. His movements were all jerky, distinct, artificial. "Welcome,
dear friends, countrymen, and offworlders. It is my duty and pleasure today to entertain and enlighten you
with legerdemain and scientific patter." He cocked an eyebrow. "Then I go into a little rant about the
mutability of life here, and its myriad forms of adaptation to the jubilee tides. Where Terran flora and
fauna -- most particularly including ourselves -- cannot face the return of Ocean, to the native biota the
tides are merely a passing and regular event. Evolution, endless eons of periodic flooding, blah blah blah.
Sometimes I compare Nature to a magician -- myself by implication -- working changes on a handful of
tricks. All of which leads in to the observation that much of the animal life here is dimorphic, which means
simply that it has two distinct forms, depending on which season of the great year is in effect.
"Then I demonstrate." He held the rainbird perched on his forefinger, gently stroking its head. The
long tailfeathers hung down like teardrops. "The rainbird is a typical shapeshifter. When the living change
comes over the Tidewater, when Ocean rises to drown half of Continent, it adapts by transforming into a
more appropriate configuration." Suddenly he plunged both hands deep into the bowl of water. The bird
struggled wildly, and disappeared in a swirl of bubbles and sand.
The illusionist lifted his hands from the water. The bureaucrat noted that he had not so much as gotten
his sleeves wet.
When the water cleared, a multicolored fish was swimming in great agitation in the water, long fins
trailing behind. "Behold!" Chu cried. "The sparrowfish -- in great summer morph an aviform, and a
pisciform for the great winter. One of the marvelous tricks that Nature here plays."
The bureaucrat applauded. "Very neatly done," he said with only slight irony.
"I also do tricks with a jar of liquid helium. Shattering roses and the like."
"I doubt that will be necessary. You said there was a point to your demonstration?"
"Absolutely." The illusionist's eyes glittered. "It's this: Gregorian is going to be a very difficult man to
catch. He's a magician, you see, and native to the Tidewater. He can change his own form, or that of his
enemy, whichever he pleases. He can kill with a thought. More importantly, he understands the land here,
and you don't. He can tap its power and use it against you."
"You don't actually believe that Gregorian is a magician? That he has supernatural powers, I mean."
"Implicitly."
In the face of that fanatical certainty, the bureaucrat did not know what to say. "Ahem. Yes. Thank
you for your concern. Now, what say we get down to business?"
"Oh yes, sir, immediately, sir." The young man touched a pocket, and then another. His expression
changed, grew pained. In an embarrassed voice he said, "Ah... I'm afraid I left my materials in the
forward stowage. If you would wait?"
"Of course." The bureaucrat tried not to be pleased by the young man's obvious discomfort.
With Chu gone, the bureaucrat returned to his contemplation of the passing forest below. The airship
soared and curved, dipped its nose and sank low in the air. The bureaucrat remembered his first sighting
of it back in Port Richmond, angling in for a docking. Complex with flukes, elevators, and lifting planes,
the great airship somehow transcended the antique awkwardness of its design. It descended slowly,
gracefully, rotor blades thundering. Barnacles covered its underbelly, and mooring ropes hung from its
jaws like strings of kelp.
A few minutes later the Leviathan docked at a heliostat tower at the edge of a dusty little river town.
A lone figure in crisp white climbed the rope ladder, and then the heliostat cast off again. Nobody
debarked.
The lounge door opened, and a slim woman in the uniform of internal security entered. She strode
forward, hand extended, to offer her credentials. "Lieutenant-Liaison Emilie Chu," she said. Then, "Sir?
Are you quite all right?"