"David Zindell - Neverness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

fireplace behind us. “Mallory," the man said, “and Bardo, what are you
two doing here?"

My eyes adjusted to the dim orange light, and I saw the master pilot,
Lionel Killirand. He shot me a swift look with his hard little eyes and
contracted his blonde eyebrows quizzically. “Soli," he said to the tall
man next to him, “allow me to present your nephew."

The tall man turned into the light, and I looked at my uncle, Leopold
Soli, the Lord Pilot of our Order. It was like looking at myself.

He stared at me with troubled, deep-set, blue eyes. I did not like what
I saw in his eyes; I remembered the stories my Aunt Justine had told me,
that Soli was a man famous for his terrible, unpredictable rages. Like
mine, his nose was long and broad, the mouth wide, firm. From his long
neck to his skates, thick black woolens covered his lean body. He seemed
intensely curious, scrutinizing me as carefully as I did him. I looked
at his hair; he looked at mine. His hair was long and bound back with a


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silver chain, as was the custom of his birth planet, Simoom. He had
unique hair, wavy black shot with red, a genetic marker of some Soli
forebear who had tampered with the family chromosomes. My hair, thank
God, was pure black. I looked at him; he looked at me. I wondered for
the thousandth time about my chromosomes, “Moira's son." He said my
mother's name as one says a curse word. “You shouldn't be here, should
you?" “I wanted to meet you," I said. “My mother has talked about you
all my life." “Your mother hates me."

There was a long silence broken by Bardo who said, “Where's the
bartender?"

The bartender, a tonsured novice who wore the white wool cap of Borja
over his bald head, opened the storage room door behind the bar. He
said, “This is the master pilot's bar. journeymen drink at the
journeymen's bar, which is five bars down the gliddery towards the
Street of Musicians." “Novices don't tell journeymen what to do," Bardo
said. “I'll have a pipe of toalache and my friend drinks
coffee-Summerworld coffee if you have it, Farfara if you don't."

The novice shrugged his skinny shoulders and said, “The master pilots
don't smoke toalache in this bar." “I'll have a tumbler of liquid
toalache, then." “We don't serve toalache or coffee." “Then we'll have
an amorgenic. Something strong to send the hormones gushing. We've a
busy night ahead of us."

Soli picked up a tumbler of a smoky colored liquid and took a sip.