"Lawrence Watt-Evans - War Surplus 02 - The Wizard and the War Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

the wizard and the war
machine
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Copyright © 1987 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91228
ISBN 0-345-33459-0
Cover Art by Darrell K. Sweet
e-book ver.1.0


Dedicated to Lester del Rey




Chapter One

BRIGHT DAYLIGHT SPILLED THROUGH THE CHUNKS of colored glass set into the windows,
striping the fur carpets with bands of red and green and blue. The children were using the slowly shifting
streaks of colored light in a complicated game of their own devis-ing; Sam Turner watched for a moment,
standing in the kitchen doorway, but could make no sense of it. The only rule he could see was that when
the daylight's movement caused any particular stripe to touch a new rug, everybody screamed with
excitement and ran about wildly.
Perhaps, he thought with a smile, that was really the only rule there was.
Back on Old Earth or Mars the sun's movement would have been too slow to use in a children's game;
even here on Dest, in the deep of winter, when the elongated stripes made its motion more obvious, he was
surprised to see it involved.
"Daddy!" little Zhrellia called. "Daddy, Daddy, you play!"
He shook his head. "No, I don't know how. Be-sides, I should get to the market before all the good stuff
is gone." He gestured at the folded linen sack he had tucked under one arm.
All three children expressed polite dismay, Zhrellia pouting, Debovar downcast, and Ket impassive. Ket
added, "Will you bring us some honey? It was all gone at breakfast."
"I'll see." He smiled fondly. "You just go on with your game. If you need anything, shout; your mother will
hear you."
He was lucky, he told himself as he crossed the room, to have three such children, all healthy, without a
visible mutation amongst them. He was lucky to have the wife he did, and his position in the community.
Most of all, he was lucky to be alive, after what he had been through in his younger days. Back then, when
he was traveling through space with a bomb in his head, fighting under the direction of an irrational
computer a war that was long over, he would never have believed he would someday have children and a
comfortable home.
He paused at the threshold to wave a farewell, then stepped through the door to the little platform beyond,
leaving the luxuries of his family's apartments behind.
Around him were four bare wooden walls, and two floors above him was a patchwork of metal, wood,
and concrete that served as a ceiling. The wooden platform on which he stood was secured to only two of
the walls, forming a triangle across one corner of the chamber. Other doors opened onto similar platforms
from other walls and on other levels, but most of the area that should have been floor was simply open
space over a hundred-meter drop.
He glanced over the edge, gathered his concentra-tion, and stepped off.
At first he hung suspended in midair, but then he allowed himself to sink slowly but steadily downward.
 He looked about casually, watching the walls slide up past him; the rusty, blast-twisted steel frame of the