Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Frederick Marshall Brown [Ravaging Myths 01] Ravaging Myths (pdf)(1)
- Frederic Pohl Cykl Saga o Heechach (4) Kroniki HeechĂłw
- Frederik Pohl & Jack Williamson Starchild Trilogy
- Frederik Pohl The Boy Who Would Live Forever
- suma_22
- Coulter Catherine MśÂoda pani Sherbrooke
- Kelley Armstrong Stolen
- Frost Jeaniene Nocna śÂowczyni 01 W póśÂ drogi do grobu
- Hawaiian Magic by Dr. Clark Wilkerson
- Palmer Diana Powrót do Arizony
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- anapro.xlx.pl
either anger or fear-astonishment, at least, Harold decided, annoyed as he
always was because Heechee expressions were hard for a human to read. The
newcomers looked human enough to Harold, though there was something about the
way they walked, hard to see at this distance, that was odd.
Harold looked again, and saw something else.
The Wheel had turned a bit farther.
Now, just past the bulk of the ship, out in the emptiness of intergalactic
space, was the cluster of patches of dirty-yellow light the
Wheel was there to watch.
The light was not really yellow to begin with, of course. Spectroscopy showed
that far more than ninety percent of the radiation from the kugelblitz was in
the violet end of the optical spectrum and beyond; but those frequencies were
bad for human or Heechee eyes. The transparent shell had been doped to exclude
them. Only the yellow came through.
Harold grinned in satisfaction. "What's the matter, Dopey?" he said
patronizingly. "You suddenly scared about the kugelblitz?"
Sneezy blinked those great, pink, odd-looking Heechee eyes at him.
"Scared of the kugelblitz? No. What are you talking about?"
"You look so funny," Harold explained.
"I'm not funny. I'm mad. Look at that!" Sneezy waved a skinny arm at the dock.
"That's a Heechee ship! And the people are all wearing
Ancestor pods! But every one of those people is human."
If Harold had been a Heechee boy instead of a very human one, he wouldn't have
laughed about the kugelblitz.
The kugelblitz was not a laughing matter. The kugelblitz was where the
Foe lived-the beings the Heechee called "the Assassins." The Heechee had not
given them that name as a jest. To the Heechee there was nothing jestable
about the Foe. Heechee didn't laugh at dangerous things. They ran away from
them.
That was another significant difference between Sneezy and Harold. And then
there was Oniko, who was different still.
Oniko Bakin was one of the new arrivals. Her contingent of replacements
included twenty-two humans and no Heechee at all. Four of them were children,
and the one who turned up in Sneezy's school was Oniko. When she appeared for
classes on her first day, the other children clustered around her. "But you're
human," one said. "So why do you wear a Heechee pod?"
"We always have," she explained. Then she courteously shushed them to pay
attention to the teacherthing.
Oniko was indeed human. She was also female, and just about Sneezy's age. Her
skin was pale olive. Her eyes were black and hooded with an epicanthic fold.
Her hair was straight and black, and Sneezy was proud to be able to identify
her by these signs as one of that sub-genre of human beings called "Oriental."
She spoke colloquial English, though. To Sneezy's surprise, she spoke
colloquial Heechee, too. Lots of humans spoke a little Heechee, more or less,
but Oniko was the first in Sneezy's experience who was equally at home in both
the language of Do and the language of Feel.
That did not lessen his astonishment at seeing a human child wearing a pod.
In eurhythmics, that first day she was in school with him, Oniko became his
partner for stretch-and-bend movements. Sneezy got a closeup look at her.
Although he still thought that her flesh was distressingly flabby and her mass
worrisomely large, he liked the sweet smell of her breath and the gentle way
she spoke his name-not "Dopey," not even "Sneezy," but "Sternutator," in the
Heechee tongue. He was disappointed when their housething called early to take
her out of school for some formality with her parents, because he wanted to
know her better.
Page 18
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
At home that night he tried asking his father why a human being should
wear a pod. "Very simple, Sterny," Bremsstrahlung said wearily. "They were a
lost catch."
The reason Bremsstrahlung was tired was that he had been doing double duty.
All the watchers had. The times when a ship was docked at the Wheel were
thought to be specially vulnerable, since a certain amount of confusion was
inevitable. At such times every Dream Seat was manned and all the watchers
kept on duty until the ship had departed and the Wheel was secure once more.
It had been a very long shift for Bremsstrahlung. "A lost catch," he
explained, "is a group of human beings who flew one of our ships to a one-way
destination. As to this one, ask your mother; she talked to the ship's crew."
"Only for a moment," Femtowave protested. "I was hoping for news from
Home."
Bremsstrahlung patted her fondly. "What news could there be when they left
only-what was it, three or four hours after we did?"
Femtowave acknowledged the correctness of his observation with a flexion of
her throat. She said in amusement, "The poor crew still was in shock. They
were all Heecjiee. They left the core with specialists and materials to go to
Earth, stopped there, were loaded with supplies for us, stopped on the way to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]