The Singers of Time
- Автор: Пол Фредерик, Уильямсон Джек
- Год: 1991
- Язык: английский
- Год: Bantam Books
- ISBN: 9780553294323
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Singers of Time». Краткое содержание книги:
At last Litlun engaged his transposer and spoke. "This is very difficult for us," he said—quite unnecessarily. No one was in any doubt of that. "We agree that we must speak to you of things that have never been spoken outside the Brotherhood, but—" Lidun stopped, plucking nervously at the hard shell of his plastron. "But we do not know certainly what things we must share." He swiveled both eyes to Francis Krake. "Captain, when will we arrive at our destination?"
Krake gave his crew an inquiring glance. "Daisy Fay?"
"We'll be there in about twenty-two hours, Captain," the machine-girl told him.
Litlun waved both horny arms in a slow affirmative gesture. "Then I propose this," he said through the transposer, one eye inquiringly on the other Turtle for approval. "Let us postpone these questions until we see what we find at the Mother planet. If it is as we—" he paused, clucking to himself before he was able to speak the frightening thought—"have reason to believe," he went on, dodging the pain of specificity, "then we will share all our thoughts with you. But until then, allow us to wait." He hesitated again, then managed to get out that very un-Turtlelike word: "Please."
Astonishingly, Sue-ling was touched. "Of course," she blurted, but Sork's shout overrode her.
"No!" he cried. "That's not good enough!"
"But it is all we can do," Lidun said—or moaned; even the flat voice of the transposer seemed to be pleading.
"It isn't," Sork said. His voice was hostile, and he didn't even look at the others for concurrence. "YouVe kept too many secrets, and youVe kept them too long. We don't even know why your Mother matters so much to you!"
There was a startled, shocked hiss from both Turtles at that. Sork blinked at the intensity of the reaction, and his twin quickly put in: "Sork doesn't mean to offend against your religion—"
"It is not a religion," Chief Thunderbird blazed.
"Well, whatever it is. The thing is, we just don't understand the severity of this crisis for you."
Transposes off, the two Turtles shrilled and croaked at each other for a moment. Then Chief Thunderbird turned the transposer back on. "We will tell you what we can," he said sourly. "What do you specifically wish to know?"
"Everything," Sork snapped.
"There is no need for you to know 'everything'!" He paused, then made himself go on. "It is enough for you to know that we are all brothers—almost all of us still alive, born of a single Mother. So our loss is grievous."
"She must have a lot of kids," Marco Ramos piped up. He drew a scathing look from Chief Thunderbird.
"The Mother," he said severely, "produces some two eggs a minute, for all of her blessed fertile life."
"Which is how long?" Sue-ling asked.
"There is no need for you to know that," the Turtle stated.
"But after a while she does die? And then what?"
More agitated squawking between the Turtles. Then it was Litlun who said, "Then a nymph is caused to mature. She becomes the new Mother, and a new Brotherhood begins."
"And where does this nymph come from?" Krake began, but the Turtle scratched his belly plate warningly.
"That is not a proper question," he decreed.
"It's the question I'm asking, though," Krake said stubbornly.
More conferring in squawks and hisses. Then, grudgingly, Chief Thunderbird spoke. "A very few of each Mother's eggs are female. Some are allowed to develop. Others are . . . not." And the parrot beak snapped shut.
"There will be no more questions on this subject," Litlun decreed, but Sork Quintero was shaking his head.
"Wrong," he said. "There's at least one more, and we want an answer. Why don't you simply do what you usually do and let a new nymph take over?"
This time there was no discussion. Both Turtles stood silent for a moment, eyes wandering aimlessly, before Chief Thunderbird said slowly, miserably, "This time there are no nymphs left, either."
An hour later, Sue-ling was in her little cabin, doing her best to go to sleep. She wasn't really tired but, medically speaking, she was aware that it was sleeping time, and she wanted to be fully awake for their arrival at the Mother planet.
What kept waking her up wasn't the excitement of the trip, and the tragic fears of the Turtles. It was Sork Quintero. It wasn't good for him to get so tense and argumentative. And she was not able to get out of her mind his quick, sardonic remark as she left him: "If I can't have what I want, maybe a drink would be second best."
And then, of course, she had had to spend half an hour with him, talking him out of it. She resented the imposition, kept asking herself why she had bothered. She knew, as a doctor, that the only person who could keep an alcoholic dry was the alcoholic himself.
And yet, he was so sad. Finally she took herself off, consoling herself with the thought that there wasn't anyplace for him to get a drink on the ship. . . .
When she woke to the sound of hammering on her door frame she began to suspect she had been wrong about that. She got up, pulling a robe around her—it wasn't really a robe but a long tunic she had borrowed from Francis Krake, and she thought she could detect his masculine odor in it—and stumbled to the curtain door, her hair undone, her eyes swollen from sleep. When she pulled the curtain door back she was not surprised to find herself blinking into the reddened eyes of Sork Quintero.
"What do you want?" she asked fuzzily. "I was sound asleep."
"I need to talk to you. Let me in."
She stood silendy regarding him, wrinkling her nose as she caught a whiff of his whiskey breath. Then she shook her head. "I just got up. I need to get cleaned up and dressed. You can wait out here if you want to." And slid the curtain closed in his angry face.
Time was when a young woman about to face an interview with a lover—by the looks of it an unpleasant interview— would have spent at least an hour on makeup and hair and choosing just the right dress.
Sue-ling was not of that generation. If she had been, she would still have been forced to make compromises, given the sparse resources of The Golden Hind. She rinsed herself off in the spray chamber, pulled on a clean coverall and glanced at herself in the mirror. She did go so far as to pull a comb through her hair, but that was it.
But she did it all in slow morion, because she was determined not to let Sork Quintero hurry her into anything. When at last she let Sork in he plumped himself down on the edge of her bed, sliding the door closed behind him. He glared at her silently.
"All right," she said. "What's this all about?"
"You know damn well!" Sork snapped. "I'm not stupid."
She said, controlling her patience, "And what is it that you're not stupid about?"
"Francis Krake! I've seen the way you act around him, and it isn't fair to me. To us," he corrected himself. "Kiri's as upset as I am."
"I don't believe that, Sork."
"Then just believe that I'm hurting over it!"
Sue-ling gazed at him blankly. "What are you talking about?" she asked, her tone purely wondering. "Francis Krake is the captain of this ship. We're all stuck in here together. We have to get along—"
"You don't have to get along that well!" Sork said resentfully. "YouVe kept Kiri and me on the hook for months now. You always said you would marry one of us—"
"I said I thought I would—"
"You made us believe that was what you intended! And now here comes this new man, and you're hanging on his every word, following him around—anybody can see that you think he's pretty fascinating."
Sue-ling said, as simply and clearly as she could, "I've never even kissed Francis Krake. He hasn't shown any signs of wanting to kiss me, either. There is no 'relationship' to discuss— and, Sork, I'm astonished at you. I didn't expect this kind of jealousy from you."