Читаем Nightside the Long Sun полностью

As swiftly as he had snatched the ball from Horn, he scooped it up. This was a bad quarter, he reminded himself, though there were so many good people in it. Without law, even good people stole: their own property vanished, and their only recourse was to steal in turn from someone else. What would his mother have thought, if she had lived to learn where the Chapter had assigned him? She had died during his final year at the schola, still believing that he would be sent to one of the rich manteions on the Palatine and someday become Prolocutor.

“You’re so good-looking,” she had said, raising herself upon her toes to smooth his rebellious hair. “So tall! Oh, Silk, my son! My dear, dear son!”

(And he had stooped to let her kiss him.)

My son was what he had been taught to call laymen, even those three times his own age, unless they were very highly placed indeed; then there was generally some title that could be gracefully employed instead, Colonel or Commissioner, or even Councillor, although he had never met any of the three and in this quarter never would—though here was a poster with the handsome features of Councillor Loris, the secretary of the Ayuntamiento: features somewhat scarred now by the knife of some vandal, who had slashed his poster once and stabbed it several times. Silk felt suddenly glad that he was in the Chapter and not in politics, though politics had been his mother’s first choice for him. No one would slash or stab the pictured face of His Cognizance the Prolocutor, surely.

He tossed the ball into his right hand and thrust his left into his pocket. The cards were still there: one, two, three. Many men in this quarter who worked from shadeup to dark—carrying bricks or stacking boxes, slaughtering, hauling like oxen or trotting beneath the weighty litters of the rich, sweeping and mopping—would be fortunate to make three cards a year. His mother had received six, enough for a woman and a child to live decently, from some fund at the fisc that she had never explained, a fund that had vanished with her life. She would be unhappy now to see him in this quarter, walking its streets as poor as many of its people. She had never been a happy woman in any case, her large dark eyes so often bright with tears from sources more mysterious than the fisc, her tiny body shaken with sobs that he could do nothing to alleviate.

(“Oh, Silk! My poor boy! My son!”)

He had at first called Blood sir, and afterward, my son, himself scarcely conscious of the change. But why? Sir because Blood had been riding in a floater, of course; only the richest of men could afford to own floaters. My son afterward. “The old cull’s dead, then?… It doesn’t make a bad bit’s difference to us, does it, Patera?… Nice of him.” Blood’s choice of word and phrase, and his almost open contempt for the gods, had not accorded with the floater; he had spoken better—far better—than most people in this quarter; but not at all like the privileged, well-bred man whom Silk would have expected to find riding in a private floater.

He shrugged, and extracted the three cards from his pocket.

There was always a good chance that a card (still more, a cardbit) would be false. There was even a chance, as Silk admitted to himself, that the prosperous-looking man in the floater—that this odd man Blood—kept false cards in a special location in his card case. Nevertheless all three of these appeared completely genuine, sharp-edged rectangles two thumbs by three, their complex labyrinths of gold encysted in some remarkable substance that was almost indestructible, yet nearly invisible. It was said that when two of the intricate golden patterns were exactly alike, one at least was false. Silk paused to compare them, then shook his head and hurried off again in the direction of the market. If these cards were good enough to fool the sellers of animals, that was all that mattered, though he would be a thief. A prayer, in that case, to Tenebrous Tartaros, Pas’s elder son, the terrifying god of night and thieves.

* * *

Maytera Marble sat watching, at the back of her class. There had been a time, long ago, when she would have stood, just as there had been a time when her students had labored over keyboards instead of slates. Today, now—in whatever year this might be … Might be …

Her chronological function could not be called; she tried to remember when it had happened before.

Maytera Marble could call a list of her nonfunctioning or defective components whenever she chose, though it had been five years or fifty since she had so chosen. What was the use? Why should she—why ever should anyone—make herself more miserable than the gods had chosen to make her? Weren’t the gods cruel enough, deaf to her prayers through so many years, so many decades and days and languid, half-stopped hours? Pas, Great Pas, was god of mechanisms, as of so much else. Perhaps he was too busy to notice.