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- Jack Vance Dying Earth 03 Cugel's Saga
- Frederick Marshall Brown [Ravaging Myths 01] Ravaging Myths (pdf)(1)
- Jack L. Chalker Rings 2 Pirates Of The Thunder
- Jack Vance Alastor 2262 Trullion
- Jack L. Chalker X 4 Medusa A Tiger by the Tail
- Jack L. Chalker QM 1 The Demons at Ra
- London, Jack Gente del abismo
- Jack L. Chalker Rings 1 Lords Of The M
- Jack L. Chalker Downtiming the Night S
- Fiolet Magdalena Kozak
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
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member of me. And you must love me."
The girl abandoned herself to a storm of weeping. After some thought, the
rogue re-entered her mind, sought for and found certain centers it had learned
to recognize and caused her to go to sleep. It then paused and considered what
it knew about the maintenance of organic masses of organized matter. This was,
in truth, very little; but certain peremptory needs were clear. The girl would
need protection against the elements and a place to rest She would need air
for combustion, the rogue thought, and observed that this was in adequate
supply from the ambient atmosphere; she would need liquid HaO, easily procured
nearby. And she would also need metabolizable chemicals of the class it
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described by the vaguely comprehended label "food."
All these matters it determined to deal with. First it opened the door of its
cab. Then it sought out and re-, entered the sleeth, hovering half stunned and
bewildered over the hilltop, and brought it arrowing swiftly back
390
into the tunnel. The sleeth's great body felt supple and powerful after the
clanking paralytic environment of the handling machine; the rogue caused it to
soar into the mouth of the tunnel, hurtle down a straightway, round a curve
and join the group. It felt joy in the strength of the great muscles, delight
in the silent power of its transflection fields, pleasure even in the dreadful
radiation that it could evoke from the huge blind eyes. It lifted the girl's
sleeping body in the deadly, gentle claws and traced a tightening curve along
the tunnel's way, into the mountain and down, until it found a pit that it had
not previously observed.
The rogue paused, probing the dark space at the bottom of the pit. It found
nothing hostile, nothing of organized organic matter. It was, in fact, a
long-forgotten base of the scientific establishment of the Plan of Man; the
rogue had no notion what that meant, and still less interest.
Careful with Molly, holding her cuddled against the great sleek belly of the
sleeth, it dropped into the dark, drifting slowly downward past the vertical
walls, until it dropped out of darkness into a cold, ghostly light. They were
in a huge sphere hollowed in the rock at the base of the hill. Once
multiplying neutrons had flashed through and saturated a few kilograms of
fissionable metal, the nuclear explosion had blossomed and shrugged tens of
thousands of tons of rock away, melting the inner shell and holding it
suspended, like a balloon, long enough for the dome shape
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20
Trilogy.txt (182 of 206) [12/28/2004 10:49:12 PM]
file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/LoPL%20full%20...child%20(3
)/Starchild%2001-03%20-%20The%20Starchild%20Trilogy.txt to form. As the
pressure leaked away the plastic rock hardened, and what was left was this
great ball-shaped cave.
The pale light came from all about it, especially from a pale cold sun of
milky mist that hung at the center of the hollow. A spiral staircase, skeletal
metal treads and a handrail, wound upward inside a spidery steel tower from
the bottom of the globular cavity's floor to a railed platform half inside
that high, pale cloud of opal light
What was the hollow?
What was the light?
The rogue gave those questions no consideration. Tenderly it set Molly
Zaldivar down on the bottom of the hollow and allowed her to waken.
To the extent that the nonhuman intelligence of the rogue was capable of
satisfaction, it was now pleased with what it had done. It had removed the
person of the oddly attractive organized bit of matter called Molly Zaldivar
to
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a place where it would not be harmed by outside activities, and where its own
attempts to establish communication could go on without interference. It was a
place whose chemistry, pressure and temperature appeared to be compatible with
life, as far as the rogue was able to judge.
Of course, the rogue was still comparatively young in time, lacking
experience, and even with the absorbed patterns that were all that was left of
Cliff Hawk embodied in its own systems, it had no very deep understanding of
biological chemistry.
An attractive feature of the cave, for the rogue, was the presence of residual
ionizing radiation, coming from the surrounding rock, the very atmosphere
inside the bubble, above all from that queerly glowing misty cloud of light To
the rogue this was a welcome source of energy to be tapped at need. It did not
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know that to Molly Zaldivar it was a death warrant.
When the girl woke up she cried out, peered wildly around the pit, saw the
hovering form of the sleeth and tried to leap up and run away. There was
nowhere to run. She slipped on the curving stone, black-stained and slick with
seeping water, and lay there for a moment, sobbing.
The rogue attempted to form patterns of sound to communicate with her. It was
difficult. Even using the transflec-tion fields of the sleeth, modulating them
as rapidly and precisely as it could, there was no handy substance for it to
vibrate; all it could produce from the shaking of the metallic substance of
the nearby tower and steps was a harsh metallic scream, incomprehensible to
Molly, and frightening.
The rogue was, for some picoseconds, baffled. Its persona, the sfeeth, had no
vocal chords, no mechanisms at all for making signals in air. But the rogue
was more than the sleeth.
It extended a quick plasma finger and probed the tower itself. There, rustless [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]