"Jack Vance - The Languages of Pao" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

old, much older than you look."
Palafox's face underwent a peculiar change. The cheeks suffused with
red, the eyes glittered like bits of glass. His voice was slow, icy cold. "I am
not old. Never make such a remark again. It is an ill thing to say to a
Breakness dominie!"
"I'm sorry!" quavered Beran. "I thought..."
"No matter. Come, you are tired, you shall sleep."
Beran awoke in puzzlement to find himself not in his pink and black
bed. After contemplating his position, he felt relatively cheerful. The future
promised to be interesting, and when he returned to Pao he would be
equipped with all the secret lore of Breakness.
He rose from the bunk, shared breakfast with Palafox, who seemed to be
in high spirits. Beran took sufficient courage to put a few further inquiries.
"Are you actually a wizard?"
"I can perform no miracles," said Palafox, "except perhaps those of the
mind."
 No.
"We are not neutraloids," said Palafox decisively. "Our modifications
enhance rather than eliminate our powers. Anti-gravity web is meshed into
the skin of my feet. Radar in my left hand, at the back of my neck, in my
forehead, provides me with a sixth sense. I can see three colors below the
red and four over the violet. I can hear radio waves. I can walk under water;
I can float in space. Instead of bone in my forefinger, I carry a projection
tube. I have a number of other powers, all drawing energy from a pack
fitted into my chest."
Beran was silent for a moment. Then he asked diffidently, "When I
come to Breakness, will I be modified too?"
Palafox considered Beran as if in the light of a new idea. "If you do
exactly as I say you must do."
Beran turned his bead. "What must I do?"
"For the present, you need not concern yourself."
Beran went to the port and looked out, but nothing could be seen but
speed-striations of gray and black.
"How long before we reach Breakness?" he asked.
"Not so very long...Come away from the port. Looking into sub-space
can harm a susceptible brain."
Indicators on the control panel vibrated and fluttered; the space-boat
gave a quick lurch.
Palafox stepped up to look from the observation dome. "Here is
Breakness!"
Beran, standing on his tiptoes, saw a gray world, and behind, a small
white sun. The space-boat whistled down into the atmosphere, and the
world grew large.
Beran glimpsed mountains enormous beyond imagination: claws of rock
forty miles high trailing plumes of vapor, rimed by ice and snow. The boat
slipped across a gray-green ocean, mottled by clumps of floating weed,
 Beran was vaguely disappointed. I had expected something different.
"We make no pretensions," Palafox remarked. "There are, after all, a
very few dominie. And we see very little of each other."
Beran started to speak, then hesitated, sensing that he was touching