Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
"I don't-"
"There. The yellow fire."
Yes. The worm's skin seemed to be blazing just ahead over a patch bigger than I was. When we were closer I saw the strange transformation of the giant creature's flesh within that patch: something dark and hard was visible deep within, and all about it was the fiery glow of inflammation that Vabrikant called jade-light. He went to work unhesitatingly, hacking open the side of the worm with the pick, then using the scimitar to widen the incision. He inserted the two-pronged device as a clamp. With steady even strokes he cut his way inward. The worm showed no reaction to what he was doing.
"That's the critter in there," he said. "This is the jade, growing around it. Reach in and touch it with your hand."
"In there?" "Reach in, boy."
I crawled forward, shuddering, and thrust my arm deep within the quivering incision until I touched something hard and smooth as glass. It was the wall of the cyst that surrounded the trapped parasitical insect.
"I feel it," I said. "What do we do now?"
"We cut it out. The danger is that the critter won't be dead. If it isn't, it's going to be awful hungry and not in a real good mood. When we open the wall it's likely to jump out at us. It's got one hell of a beak." "How can we tell if it's dead?"
"By opening the wall," Vabrikant said. "If it don't jump at us, then it's dead. If it do, we're in trouble. We lose a devil of a lot of jade miners every year."
I stared at him. But he simply shrugged and set to work.
It took half an hour, working with a drilling-bit and chisel, to cut the jade cyst from its matrix in the worm's soft flesh. When I pointed out that a laser knife would have done the job a lot faster he looked at me in sorrow, as though I were mentally defective. "Give us lasers, sure. The overmasters would really go for that idea." I felt worse than foolish. We were not merely slaves but prisoners.
Luck was with us this time. The worm had done its job of self-defense; when we lifted the jade slab that Vabrikant had cut free we saw the husk of the insect dead within, dry and empty. "There are days I almost hope one of them will pop out and kill me," he said. "But I guess I don't really want that or I'd go looking for it, I guess. Here. Take hold with me." He caught the inner face of the jade cyst and pulled it free, dumping the shell of the dead insect back into the depths of the worm's flesh. As we stepped away, the wound was already beginning to close; we got our tools out just in time. And the worm moved on.
That was how jade was mined on Alta Hannalanna. You'd trek endlessly for hours down the clammy tunnels searching for a worm, scan up and down the length of its immense body for the jade-light that marked an entrapped parasite, start cutting and hope for the best. Hours of numbing boredom relieved only by a few minutes of terror, followed by hours of boredom again. With that revolting sickly-sweet stench in your nostrils all the time. And then try to find your way back to the dormitory. Vabrikant always knew the way, but I wasn't always paired with Vabrikant; sometimes I went out with younger men who didn't have much more of a sense of the tunnels than I did, and we got lost, and then after a while I was often the senior member of the mining team, for new slaves arrived all the time, and it became my job to try to find the way. Sometimes we wandered for days trying to return, and there was nothing to eat but the stuff we carved from the walls of the tunnel.
About one worm out of three carried an encysted parasite. Maybe one parasite out of three was still alive when we cut into the jade. You had to be ready to bash it with your pick if it came charging out; that was why we traveled in pairs, one to cut, one to stand guard. Even so slaves died all the time. Sometimes you met a free parasite that was wandering the tunnels looking for a worm. That was always bad. They came charging at you like demons. When we did manage to find our way back to the dormitory after filling our quota of jade it was cold comfort indeed. All we did was rest and brood until it was time to go out again. It was a bleak, hopeless existence. Life at the dorm was so grim that after a little while we started looking forward to our next tour out in the tunnels. We talked constantly about escaping, of somehow getting on board one of the relay-sweep capsules that periodically took the jade away to be sold. To do that we'd have to mount an attack on the overmasters, who guarded us when we were at the base. The overmasters were slaves themselves; no one would work for pay alone on a planet like this; but they set themselves up as our enemies and there was no hope of conspiring with them. They were armed with truncheons and with sensory-whips and they went swaggering about glowering at us as though we were troublesome dogs. Usually the truncheons were enough to keep us in line, but once in a while some miner went seriously berserk and then the sensory-whip would come into play. Those who had felt its lash never risked it a second time. But I did.
TO KEEP FROM GOING OUT OF MY MIND I GHOSTED OBSESSIVELY, compulsively, all over space and time, taking the big jump fifty times a day. Sometimes I even did it when I was crawling down a tunnel toward a worm, although you aren't supposed to ghost in dangerous circumstances because it diverts your attention for a fraction of a moment, and sometimes that can be fatal. Maybe I didn't give a damn; maybe I was feeling a little suicidal, or just reckless. Or maybe I thought that if I jumped often enough, one time I just wouldn't return to Alta Hannalanna at the end of the trip. But of course it doesn't work that way. You always come back.
My present was a nightmare and my future promised nothing but more of the same. So I went ghosting back into my own past most of the time, a special torment, sweet and prickly. I ghosted Nabomba Zom and I saw myself out riding with Malilini, and it broke my heart. But as I hovered invisible above that young happy pair I didn't dare make myself known to them; I remembered Loiza la Vakako's admonitions about interfering with the past, and I feared making the attempt, much as I longed to. I told myself that one ghostly word from me on the eve of Loiza la Vakako's fatal banquet could save Malilini's life and spare me from this hell of Alta Hannalanna, and yet I held my tongue. Crazy? Maybe. But my fear was even greater than my pain.
I ghosted Megalo Kastro and watched myself begging among the gentle kindly whores. I saw myself swimming for my life in that strange ocean. I went back even farther, to my life on Vietoris. I had never ghosted that far back before. I looked down at myself standing beside my father on the slopes of Mount Salvat, with Romany Star blazing in the sky.
Then I wanted to see my father again, to find out how things had gone for him after the company had sold me away into slavery. But I couldn't find him, though I roamed Vietoris from end to end. My whole family had disappeared. I thought perhaps there was something missing from my ghosting skills, that I didn't yet know all there was to know about locating particular people in space and time. That was the easy thing to believe, that it was my own fault if I couldn't find my father anywhere.
I grew bolder. I went to worlds I had never seen, Duud Shabeel, Kalimaka, Fenix, Clard Msat. They became real to me and Alta Hannalanna was only a dream. I would be right inside a worm, hacking away at its flesh, and between one second and the next I would disappear for hours on Estrilidis, Iriarte, Xamur. When I came back nothing had changed: I was still in mid-stroke, the scimitar descending. Sometimes I went away again in that very moment. It was as easy to go back a hundred years as it was to travel back a month. I swung in wider and wider loops, hurling myself backward without giving a damn about the consequences.
One day I summoned the ghosting force and sent myself out without pausing to think about where I might be going. What did it matter? Any place would be better than Alta Hannalanna. There was the familiar disorientation and dizziness and then I was looking at blue sky, heavy fleecy white clouds, a yellow sun. What place was this? Short widecrowned trees with brown trunks and green leaves, and a meadow of thick green grass, and tents in the meadow, and men and women gathered around a huge cauldron. The men wore plush waistcoasts, velvet riding-breeches, long black coats, gleaming boots that came up to mid-calf. The women had satin dresses loose and open on top to show their breasts, colorful shawls, plumed turbans. Three or four of the younger ones were singing and beating on tambourines. The men were clapping and stamping their feet. A great shaggy brown animal tethered to a pole was dancing too, comically, lurching from side to side on its powerful heavy legs. I knew at once where I was and the knowledge stunned me. Where else but lost dead Earth? Who else could these people be but a band of traveling Gypsies? How handsome they were, how vital and strong! I floated through their encampment, listening to them shouting to one another in a language that I could only understand in snatches but which beyond any doubt was some ancient form of Romany, and I felt a joy and a wonder that lifted me entirely out of my misery and swept me off into exaltation.