"Walter Jon Williams - Argonautica" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

country like a visitation from another world. Laboring darkies swarmed over the
thing like ants. Even over the sound of the General Bee's engine, Jase could
hear the ring of hammers on railroad iron.
“There she lies,” he thought, “and I am going to have her or get hung."
“Not as big as I thought,” said Ensign Harry Klee, who had seen Louisiana before
she burned.
“Big enough,” said Jase, and wondered again how he would steal her. By
indirections find directions out, he thought.
He signaled the engine room for ahead slow, then tapped the bell twice to send a
leadsman to the bow for soundings. General Bee dropped off its bow wave, slowed
in the murky water. Shoreward, a cottonmouth moccasin bared its fangs from the


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safety of an oak limb.
Strange country, Jase thought. He was a salt-water sailor, and unused to the
ways of rivers. The meandering Yazoo country was simultaneously open and
constricted—absolutely flat, though with all its sight lines hemmed in by dense
hardwood forests. Cypress, willows, cottonwoods, all thirsty trees that clung to
the banks of the river. Everything that stood was strung with vines. There were
alligators here, and snakes; herons and cormorants flocked in thousands.
And it was hot. Hot as a boiler room. Jase yearned for a sea breeze.
“By the mark three!” sang the leadsman. “Half less three! By the mark twain!"
Jase maneuvered the tug toward the bank, signaled astern slow, and brought the
Bee gently to ground on Yazoo mud. The levee began to fill with curious
bystanders.
Ensign Klee's huge body almost blocked the pilothouse window. “Any of them look
like much a senator to you, Jase?” he said.
Jase peered around Klee. “May be the fellow in the top hat."
Harry Klee squinted and spat. “He looks more like an undertaker."
“Guess I'll go ashore and find out."
Jase rolled down his shirt sleeves and put on his grey uniform jacket—visiting a
former senator required a degree of formality—then he adjusted his straw boater
and made his way past the thirty-pound Parrott rifle on the foredeck. Once
there, he discovered that the mechanism for lowering the gangway had jammed.
“Sorry, sir,” said Castor, one of the twins, in his Cockney accent. “I'll ‘ave
it fixed in a tic."
Jase looked at the group of people standing on the levee and felt his temper
rise. He decided he was not about to stand and be gawked at while he waited for
the gangway to be repaired, so he dropped off the bow and waded to the land, wet
above the knee. The Yazoo mud took one of his boots, which did not improve his
temper. He splashed ashore and mounted the four-foot-high levee in one stride.
“Senator Pendergas?” he asked the fellow in the top hat.
The man shook his head. “That's the general there,” he said, “coming this way."
The senator—now a general—was a broad, round-headed man in shirt sleeves,
striped uniform pants held across his big belly by red suspenders. His shirt
front was stained with tobacco. When Jase saluted him, Pendergas held out one
big hand and waited for Jase to shake it. Jase did as the man seemed to want.