To Ride Pegasus
- Автор: Маккефри Энн
- Серия: Talents #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «To Ride Pegasus». Краткое содержание книги:
That brought Daffyd back to the point of anger he’d reached in Gillings’s office and the whole thought sequence started again.
His path led him past the play-yard where he could hear the children yelling and screaming, arguing over some violently important triviality. Triviality? To him, perhaps, yet they were as devoted to their separate sides of the argument as he was to…
“Well?” Sally Iselin stood in his way, her fists planted on her hips, a mock ferocious expression on her pert pretty face. “Aren’t you pleased with the outcome of the hearing?” She frowned, sensing his uncertainty. “But you were able to plant a suggestion in Roznine’s mind? Oh, that Gillings. What is it about a cop that sours the man?” It was Daffyd’s turn to be surprised. “That’s pretty good reading, Sally.”
As suddenly he felt her mind tighten and the contact that had begun to lift his depression was taken away. “What does Gillings expect of us anyway?” she asked.
“A happy ending!”
Sally eyed him speculatively and then fell in step with him, grinning.
“There has to be a happy ending to every fairy tale, after all. Though I shouldn’t have expected it of Gillings, fer gawd’s sake.”
Her switch of mood, while it obscured her thoughts from him, lifted his spirits.
Nonetheless, he said rather gloomily that there hadn’t been a precog of any happy ending for Cinderella.
“Oh, you…honestly!” Sally sounded peeved and her eyes flashed at him irritably. “Your trouble, Daffyd op Owen, is that you don’t really believe in
Talent.”
“I beg your pardon?” Daffyd stopped and stared down at her.
“Just because no one has precogged a disaster of some monumental proportion resulting from this fairy tale affair, you’re down in the doldrums. Does everything Talented have to end in disaster? Are you going to be committed to grief for the rest of your born days? Or are you willing to admit that there hasn’t been a disaster precog because there isn’t going to be a disaster? That things will work out right? All the sensitives are edgy, but not miserably so. Good God, do we have to wallow in sorrow all the time? Do we have to run around wondering if we have a right to be happy?”
Daffyd thought he knew Sally Iselin fairly well but this-from a girl characteristically full of puppyish good nature and exuberance?
She turned on him, her brown eyes flashing with anger as she stamped her foot.
“And I am not a good-natured puppy! I can be just as much of a bitch as any other woman!”
In that outraged mood, she forgot to shield her inner thoughts. It was all there, what propriety had kept Daffyd from “perceiving” and her sense of honor had prevented her from showing him more openly.
Abruptly Daffyd reached out and drew her into his arms, savoring the miraculous disclosure. Unaccountably Sally struggled, and courtesy disregarded, Daffyd probed deeply into her mind, past the barriers she had carefully erected, past the pert verbosity with which she masked those inner feelings. With a strangled sob, she relaxed against him and let him perceive the whole of her conflict. The older man/much younger woman, her yearning to be tall/elegant, an appropriate spouse for a man of his status/abilities, the puppy image of herself from his mind, her feeling of inadequacy because she couldn’t locate more and more Talents to relieve the burdens on him…all the small sins and great vanities that inhabit the soul of any human being. And what he saw in that instant of perception only endeared her to him more.
With one hand he tilted her head back, forcing her to meet his eyes, amused that a telepath required a look. Her mouth lifted slightly in a smile as she shared his thought. He felt a pressing need to articulate the thoughts he was transferring to her mind but all he could say was her name before he kissed her.
No more was needed.
The next morning the nebulous anxieties of the sensitives were translated into attacks on the Talented. One of the finders attached to the LEO Block was beaten up on his way to the Center.
A Talent mechanic at the big Mid-Town Parking Complex was seriously mauled and shoved into the boot of the car he’d been servicing. Two healers in the General
Hospital were raped and shorn of their hair but their assailants were caught because the girls had the ability to “call” for help.
In the clear light of that morning, Daffyd bitterly wondered if indeed he had a right to any personal happiness.
“And if that isn’t a piece of outright antediluvian puritanical nonsense, I don’t know what is,” Sally said,, popping out of the bathroom with all the savagery of a miniature…”…I am not a miniature anything, Dai op Owen.”
But she was comical enough in her undressed state, mentally bristling at his thoughts and aggravated by his pessimistic rumination to put the morning’s disasters in their proper perspective.
“I’m not sure what good it’ll do to have Roznine marching in here now,” she went on, pouring out coffee.
“I’d hoped he’d come as soon as he regained consciousness.”
Sally’s eyebrows flicked up. “You’ve never failed of your mark before. Unless…” She pursed her lips, frowning.
“Amalda’s inhibiting him?” Daffyd caught the half-suppressed notion.
“You know she’s scared of him. I mean, scared as a woman is of a very domineering man…sexually, I mean. Oh, you know what I mean and then there’s Brace Vaden and all that.”
“Amalda had proof positive yesterday that Roznine couldn’t dominate her.”
“Perhaps…I mean, intellectually, Talent-wise, yes. But it’s Brace that’s holding her back. He’s already at the top of the Glass mountain and Amalda doesn’t dare roll the other apple.”
Daffyd caught the unarticulated ramifications of Sally’s thinking. Part of
Amalda’s reluctance to admit Roznine’s attractiveness to her stemmed from a fear of losing Bruce Vaden, to whom she was equally attracted but for different reasons.
“She’s not one to drop the bone she’s got in her mouth for the one she sees in the water,” Sally said.
“Now it’s fables?”
“Why not? You added myths to my fairy tales so it’s my shot.”
“That only leaves me proverbs.”
“So?”
“So! That leaves us with Amalda inhibiting Roznine?”
“He should’ve been here otherwise.”
Daffyd was turning over this interesting possibility in his mind when the comset beeped.
“Boss, we got pickets out in front,” said Lester in a thoroughly disgusted tone of voice. “Pay your fair share. Everyone else is taxed. Why not you? No Minority privileges.”
Daffyd sighed long and deeply.
“Pete’s on reception and he says they’ve got legal political platforms, their IDs are upstate and they’re registered party members. Legally, under the
Political Platform Act, they can picket the grounds because there is legislation concerning our tax status before the State Senate right now.”
“Did you inform Gillings?”
“Hah! They informed us about the time the first picketers foregathered on our gatestep. What’n’hell happened to your Machiavellian nonsense of yesterday?”
“ There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip!’” Daffyd replied. Sally gasped and signaled surrender.
“Huh?” Lester wanted an explanation.
“I must ask Gillings if Roznine’s had a visit from Aaron Greenfield since the hearing yesterday,” was Daffyd’s reply.
“Did you goof, boss? Now what do we do?”