Dark Light by Ken Macleod

Author:Ken Macleod [Macleod, Ken]
Language: rus
Format: epub, mobi, pdf, azw3
Published: 2010-05-15T18:35:46+00:00

Gail sat on the air-tank cylinder, elbows on her knees, and sipped from an earthenware cup a black drink that tasted bitter and slightly alcoholic. Stone had called it beer, but Gail suspected that this was a social rather than a literal translation. She tried not to let her imagination dwell on what she’d heard about heathen methods of preparing alcoholic drinks, which tended to involve stripped bark, steeped leaves, protracted communal chewing and spitting to remove poisons from essential ingredients, and weeks of fermentation in deep straw-lined pits.

Most of the women had returned to their work. The long industrial shed was humming and buzzing and clattering with the sound of tools and machinery. Voices filled the spaces between these notes and discords. A dozen or so women sat outside, legs curled under them, on scattered mats. One of them was talking earnestly to Slow Leg, squatting on his heels at the edge of her mat. The others were engaged in apparently idle chat with each other and with Stone, who was sitting among them in exactly the same pose as they had. Matt sat next to Salasso on the other air tank, sipping his drink and smoking a joint. The gear they’d brought from Rawliston—their equipment and the heathens’ Christian trade goods—was all still bundled up.

“Evidently,” said Matt, leaning sideways and passing her the joint, “this is not going to be a matter of looking over the space suit specs and cutting a deal.”

“Oh, it will be eventually,” said Gail, putting down her cup and puffing. “They just need to circle around the subject for a few hours first.”

“Yeah. Like pterosaurs waiting to make sure something is dead before they come down.”

“No!” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “This is very important to them, and to us. They have to make sure everything is”—she waved her hands—“all of a piece. It’s more like a spider joining its web back together again after it’s caught a big fly.”

Matt laughed, taking the joint back and handing it on to Salasso.

“All right, I’m willing to be patient.”

Gail didn’t feel impatient at all. She was content for the moment to sit and watch Stone and to catch his voice when he spoke. So as not to make this obvious, every so often she’d pointedly turn her gaze somewhere else, but she found herself always coming back. It was all incomprehensible and embarrassing. She wasn’t particularly attracted to women, though she got on all right with women who were. Unlike some of her friends, women she knew down at Back-o’-the-Docks, she wasn’t even fascinated by mollyboys. But there was something about the polarity she’d suddenly seen between Stone’s sex and his behavior and appearance that was like—well, like the two poles of a battery, which made her jump every time she touched them in her mind.

She turned her face away to the sky and the hills, and her mind away from the thought of a wet finger.

The next time she looked back, Stone and Slow Leg had opened some bundles.

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