Темное, кривое зеркало. Том 5 : Средь звезд, подобно гигантам.
Шрифт:
He was not dead.
Unless this was just a hallucination. A dream.
Was he a Centauri dreaming he was dead or a ghost dreaming he was alive or something in between?
He could smell smoke. It was not the braziers drifting from the feast of his dream, or his life, or whatever it had been. It was the smoke of death and madness and in its black cloud it carried with it the screams of his people.
"I cannot rest here," he whispered, and struggled to pull himself up. His muscles would not obey him, but he persevered, and managed to lift his legs over the edge of the bed. They were hideously lumpen and heavy, like dead flesh moving.
The floor was cold and hard beneath his feet, but that was good. A sensation at last. He could feel something other than pain. He could not be dead.
Through his blurred vision, something slowly swam into focus.
A meal. Food, and a glass with something in it.
He reached out with the one arm that seemed to obey him and touched the glass. Jhala. And fresh, too.
Part of his dream. No, in his dream he had been drinking brivare and Earth liquor and Minbari water and.... other things. Not jhala. A powerful thirst suddenly burned in his throat and he tried to lift the glass. It seemed impossibly heavy, and he had to support his arm with the other one, forcibly heaving the glass to his face as if it contained molten metal.
He could smell it as it came nearer, inch by agonising inch. It smelled good. Another sensation. Another sign that he was not a dead soul in a dead shell. He tried to manoeuvre the glass to his mouth.
It shattered in his hand, the drink cascading over his face and body. He opened his mouth hurriedly and actually managed to catch some of it. It tasted fine, finer than anything he could have imagined. His legs gave way beneath him and he sat back wearily on the bed, careless of the shards of glass.
"I did not supply that drink for you to throw it everywhere," said a prim voice. He turned his head to see a short, elegant woman standing demurely in the doorway. She walked forward slowly. "You are all right then. I would have hoped so, the amount of time you spent sleeping. Who would run the Republic while you were asleep, you might have thought to ask, but no." She reached his side and looked at him intently.
"Oh, Londo," she sighed. She rested her head on his shoulder. "Oh, Londo."
"Timov," he whispered. "Oh, my Timov."
The dreams were less now, the nightmares grown rarer. It was remarkable what a solid day's work would do for you. Going to bed exhausted every night left little space for bad dreams.
That was precisely how David Corwin liked it.
A piece at a time, Yedor was transforming before his eyes — growing, becoming new, becoming alive. The fields outside the city were becoming greener, the stones and the crystals slowly starting to shine. The lake was still dirty and thick with silt. The sky was still dark and heavy. The signs of the devastation of this world were still there, but they were less now.
One day, he hoped, no one would ever be able to tell what had happened. There would be no sign remaining, no hint of the bloodshed humanity was capable of.
Corwin sat silently on the banks of Turon'val'na lenn-veni, looking out across the lake. The Minbari had accepted him now, or most of them at any rate. He was even able to speak with them, and laugh and joke. But none of them were his friends.
Except perhaps one.
He heard the soft footsteps that signalled Kats' arrival. He turned to greet the little worker. As always, she was wearing a simple robe of plain white, her only ornamentation the plain necklace that hung around her neck.
"Satai," he said, nodding his head.
"David," she replied. He had insisted she use his first name. He had no title any more, and heaven hope, he never would again.
"It must have been breathtaking," he said, gesturing across the lake.
"It was," she replied, sitting beside him. "My father brought me here when I was young. He believed all the beauties of our people were embodied in every single drop of water."
"And it now symbolises the destruction of your world."
Her hand brushed his and she looked at him sharply. "You are not to blame," she said, firmly. "We have talked about it. Your world is an airless ball of rock. Ours still lives, and you work hard every day to make it live a little more. I have forgiven you for whatever sins you think you may have committed against me, but you will have to forgive yourself, and you are doing that, a little more every day."
He nodded. "There aren't any dreams any more. At least, not many."
"That is good. Can you accept what your past has brought you? Mary, Carolyn, Susan, John Sheridan — can you think about all those names now and feel no guilt?"
"A little, but that is all. Is it so wrong, anyway, to be bound by the past?"
"Wrong?" Her hand slid from his and gently brushed her necklace. "No, it is not wrong, but we must remember the good things and learn from the bad and then.... Ah, but I am lecturing you, and poorly as well. In truth, I came here to ask you something."
"Yes?"
"I have been asked by the rest of the Grey Council to visit Babylon Five soon. They would like one of us to observe things there, at the heart of the Alliance. It is time for us to look outwards again, now that we have repaired much of the damage that was within. We will need a permanent voice in the Alliance Council, and it will be good to speak with the other races in the Alliance. We have been isolated since the war ended, bound up with repairing and undoing. it is.... not good to be too isolated.
"Would you come with me?"
"What?" He started, having been momentarily lost in the melody of her voice. "I.... I am happy here."
"I do not doubt it, but you do not belong here. I do not mean in that you are an alien, but that you are not a man destined to spend the rest of his days farming or building. You are meant for more than that."
"I've seen more than that, Satai. I've seen great things. I've been at the summit of the galaxy, and do you know what happens up there? Everyone dies. At the top all you can see is chess pieces. You move them around and you sacrifice a city here and a world there, all for the greater good, and you don't see who these people are, or what that city meant to them."