Alien Archives. Robert SilverbergЧитать онлайн книгу.
“You want one too?” the bartender asked Demeris.
“A different kind this time.”
It wasn’t any better. He sipped it morosely. A few moments later the others began to file out of the room. “Abblekirky,” the woman said, as she went past Demeris, and laughed again.
He spent a troubled night. The room was musty and dank and made him feel claustrophobic. The little bed offered no comfort. Sounds came from outside, grinding noises, screeches, strange honkings. When he turned the lamp off the darkness was absolute and ominous, and when he turned it on the light bothered him. He lay stiffly, waiting for sleep to take him, and when it failed to arrive he rose and pulled the oilcloth window-cover aside to stare into the night. Attenuated streaks of brightness were floating through the air, ghostly will-o’-the-wisp glowings, and by that faint illumination he saw huge winged things pumping stolidly across the sky, great dragons no more graceful than flying oxen, while in the road below the building three flickering columns of light that surely were Spooks went past, driving a herd of lean little square-headed monsters as though they were sheep.
In the morning, after the grudging breakfast of stale bread and some sort of coffee-like beverage with an undertaste of barley that the hotel bar provided, he went out into Spook City to look for Tom. But where was he supposed to begin? He had no idea.
It was a chaotic, incomprehensible town. The unpaved streets went squiggling off in all directions, no two of them parallel. Wagons and flatbeds of the kind he had seen at the perimeter checkpoint, some of them very ornate and bizarre, swept by constantly, stirring up whirlwinds of gray dust. Ethereal shimmering Spooks drifted in and among them, ignoring the perils of the busy traffic as though they were operating on some other plane of existence entirely, which very likely they were. Now and again came a great bleating of horns and everyone moved to the side of the street to allow a parade of menacing-looking beasts to pass through, a dozen green-scaled things like dinosaurs with high-stepping big-taloned feet or a procession of elephant-camels linked trunk to tail or a string of long slithery serpentine creatures moving on scores of powerful stubby legs.
Demeris felt a curious numbness coming over him as one enormity after another presented itself. These few days across the border were changing him, creating a kind of dreamy tolerance in him. He had absorbed all the new alien sights and experiences he could and he was overloaded now, no room left for reactions of surprise or fear or even of loathing. The crazy superabundance of strangeness in Spook City was quickly starting to appear normal to him. Albuquerque in all its somnolent ordinariness seemed to him now like a static vision, a mere photograph of a city rather than an actual thriving place. There was still the problem of Tom, though. Demeris walked for hours and found no clue, no starting place: no building marked Police Station or City Hall or Questions Answered Here. What he really hoped to come upon was someone who was recognizably a native of Free Country, someone who could give him an inkling of how to go about tracing his brother through the network of kids making Entradas that must exist on this side. But he saw no one like that either. Where the hell was Jill? She was his only ally, and she had left him to cope with this lunacy all by himself, abandoning him as abruptly as she had picked him up in the first place.
But she, at least, could be located. She was the mayor’s daughter, after all.
He entered a dark, squalid little building that seemed to be some sort of shop. A small hunched woman who could have been made of old leather gave him a surly look from behind a warped counter. He met it with the best smile he could manage and said to her, “I’m new in town and I’m trying to find Jill Gorton, Ben Gorton’s daughter. She’s a friend of mine.”
“Who?”
“Jill Gorton? Ben Gorton’s—”
She shook her head curtly. “Don’t know anybody by that name.”
“Ben Gorton, then. Where can he be found?”
“Wherever he might happen to be,” she said. “How would I know?” And slammed shut on him like a trapdoor. He peered at her in astonishment. She had turned away from him and was moving things around behind her counter as though no one was there.
“Doesn’t he have an office?” Demeris asked. “Some kind of headquarters?”
No response. She got up, moving around in the shadows, ignoring him.
“I’m talking to you,” Demeris said.
She might just as well have been deaf. He quivered with frustration. It was midday and he had had practically nothing to eat since yesterday afternoon and he hadn’t accomplished anything all this day and it had started to dawn on him that he had no idea how he was going to find his way back to his hotel through the maze of the city—he didn’t even know its name or address, and the streets bore no signs anyway—and now this old bitch was pretending he was invisible. Furiously he said, “Jesus Christ, what’s the matter with you people? Haven’t you ever heard of common courtesy here? Have the fucking Spooks drained everything that’s human out of you? All I want to know is how to find the goddamned mayor. Can’t you tell me that one little thing? Can’t you?”
Instead of answering him, she looked back over her shoulder and made a sound in Spook language, a wheezing whistling noise, the kind of sound that Jill might have directed to her elephant-camel. Almost instantly a tall flat-faced man of about thirty with the same sort of dark leathery skin as hers came out of a back room and gave Demeris a black, threatening stare.
“What the hell you think you’re doing yelling at my mother?”
“Look,” Demeris said, “I just asked her for a little help, that’s all.” He was still churning with rage. “I need to find the mayor. I’m a friend of his daughter Jill, and she’s supposed to help me track down my brother Tom, who came across from Free Country a few months ago, and I don’t know one goddamned building from the next in this town, so I stopped in here hoping she could give me some directions and instead—”
“You yelled at her. You cursed at her.”
“Yeah. Maybe so. But if you people don’t have any decency why the hell should I? All I want to know—”
“You cursed at my mother.”
“Yeah,” Demeris said. “Yeah, I did.” It was all too much. He was tired and hungry and far from home and the streets were full of monsters and nobody would give him the time of day here and he was sick of it. He had no idea who moved first, but suddenly they were both on the same side of the counter and swinging at each other, butting heads and pummeling each other’s chests and trying to slam each other against the wall. The other man was bigger and heavier, but Demeris was angrier, and he got his hands to the other man’s throat and started to squeeze. Dimly he was aware of sounds all around him, doors slamming, rapid footsteps, people shouting, a thick incoherent babble of sound. Then someone’s arm was bent around his chin and throat and hands were clamped on his wrists and he was being pulled to the floor, kicking as he went and struggling to reach the knife at his waist. The confusion grew worse after that: he had no idea how many of them there were, but they were sitting on him, they were holding his arms, they were dragging him out into the daylight. He thought he saw a Spook hovering in the air above him, but perhaps he was wrong about that. There was too much light everywhere around. Nothing was clear. “Listen,” he said, “The only thing I want is—” and they hit him in the mouth and kicked him in the side, and there was some raucous laughter and he heard them speaking in the Spook language; and then he came to understand that he was in a wagon, a cart, some kind of moving contrivance. His hands and feet were tied. A flushed sweaty face looked down at him, grinning.
“Where are you taking me?” Demeris asked.
“Ben Gorton. That’s who you wanted to see, isn’t it? Ben Gorton, right?”
***
HE WAS IN A BASEMENT room somewhere, windowless, lit by three of the little Spook-lamps. It was the next day, he supposed. Certainly a lot of time had gone by, perhaps a whole night. They had given him a little to eat, some sort of bean mush. He was still bound, but two