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Jo Clayton: Shadowplay

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Jo Clayton Shadowplay

Shadowplay: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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"Go down on your hands and knees," he said. "Yes. That is correct. Now, proceed to the chair. Stop when you get there. Stay on your knees. Do not touch anything."

As she crawled across the gritty stained carpet, she put anger and fear on hold and settled to a grim waiting.

There was no point in regretting lost opportunities-which were most likely illusion anyway. Fly in a spiderweb, the more you struggle, the tighter the strands wrap round you. Wait. Keep your head down. Wait. Your time will come. He hasn't a notion what you are, what you can do. Wait.

"You may begin," he said. "Touch only your own things."

She picked up the bag, turned the flap back, found her comb and dropped it in. Working slowly, deliberately, keeping her movements unmistakably innocent, she collected her belongings and put them in the bag. When she was finished, she sat on her heels and waited.

Bossman contemplated her, his tar eyes gone dull. "Go back to your chair, young Shadith. No. Do not stand, go on your hands and knees. Yes." He waited until she was seated, then took his place at the console, bringing it up again. Over his shoulder, he said, "Number Two, come sit behind the girl, use your whip if she thinks of moving. We will not wait for Lute or Number One, they are taking longer than I am comfortable with. I will send you back with the shuttle later."

Shadith sat with her hands folded, her eyes down. Wait. Nothing ever goes exactly like anyone plans it, not'even his schemes, old monster. There's always a breakdown somewhere. Wait and watch. Your time will come. Be patient. Not like a good little girl, meek and obedient. Never! Like a cat at a mousehole. Wait.

Chapter 3. Riding the flying spiderweb

The door whooshed closed behind Bossman, expanding as it moved to fill the whole space of the opening as if it erased itself to underline the futility of trying to escape the cell. Hands clasped behind her, Shadith scowled at the seamless wall. "Mashak! Dafta! Your soul smells like dogshit."

There was no response. She didn't really expect one and shrugged off her depression as she began inspecting her new home-from-home. Four walls and a floor with warts. All the'comforts of hell. Sari

She kicked at a wart, stretched out on the cot' that unfolded from the wall and contemplated the gray monotony of the place. If Prissface left her in here too long with nothing to do, hallucinations would be the least of it.

Time.

In the diadem she was essentially immortal. She'd abandoned all that when she had Aleytys decant her into this body. I must have been out of my alleged mind.

That struck her as funny and she giggled, but the spurt of humor was quickly dissipated. Time meant more now. In a century or two she was going to die; she'd accepted that, but the idea of wasting any part of those counted hours in a hole like this with nothing to see, nothing to do, made her wild. She spent some hot, passionate moments loathing Bossman and all his satellites, then she took another minute to curse the Transit Guard's disembodied soul-Lute had to've shucked him from his body by now. If it hadn't been for him she wouldn't be in this mess.

Still muttering imprecations and incantations, she fished in her bag and pulled out the battered book, but when she tried to read, she found the light in the cell so se and dim it was like looking through a frosted screen. It made her eyes burn, her head ache. There were poems that book she'd read over and over, sucking the flavor from them one by one as if they were the sweets she was far too fond of, but when she looked at a page this time, she couldn't make sense of the marks on it. Besides, she was too upset to concentrate, especially on multi-layered poetry in outmoded and esoteric word forms. She gave up, dropped the book beside the cot and began searching through the bag for her box of lemon drops.

No box. She must have missed it when she collected her things. She swore, threw her bag across the cell, glared at it as it bounced off and plopped onto the floor. She rubbed at her eyes, got herself calmed down. All right, Shadow, let's not sit round whining. Well, lie around. Funny, why should whining sound worse lying down than sitting up?

She folded her hands over her stomach, wriggled around until she was as comfortable as she could get on that narrow cot, then she closed her eyes and reached, searching for other eyes, single or compound, large or small, anything she could look through. Somewhere, somehow, Bossman must have left a crack she could 'worry at until it was big enough to let her crawl out of this.

She touched down, looked through one set of eyes, moved on to another, then on and on through a bewildering progression of sense structures, insect compounds, arachnid multiples, vertibrate bi-and tri-polar vision, her brain struggling to adjust to and make sense of the data pulsing into it from such wildly varying sources.

In a small second hold she found the two captives that Bossman called Avatars (of what? for what? not knowing gave her an hitch in the psyche). They were lying prone on tatty mattresses and tethered to the wall by thin almost invisible cables of Menaviddan monofilament. She slipped from a spider weaving a web beneath a catwalk into the body of a small furry like a rat but not a rat that was nosing at the big man's foot. The furry nibbled at a boot, but didn't like the taste of polish; he spat out the fragment of leather, scrubbed at his tongue with supple forepaws. Ears twisting like radar dishes, he moved along the man, nipping at him, sniffing at him, put off by the tough cloth of his trousers and tunic. The man's hand was far more interesting. The furry patted a forepaw at short silky hair that ran in a vee up the back of the hand, pale hair like wood ash in his eyes-his vision was sharp at short distances but he saw mainly in shades of gray with a few stark patches of black or white. The man's palm was broad, the fingers long and tapering, with stiff curved claws rather than the fiat nails more common to bipeds.

The furry darted away when a finger twitched, edged warily back and nipped at the thumb.

A thready beam of light shot from a lens set some two meters high on the nearest wall, tapped the furry on the nose. He squealed and scuttled away, heat flaring through his body; he wasn't hurt but he was startled enough to keep away from the captives after that.

The big man had large semi-mobile pointed ears that twitched continually even though he was sodden with comealong. His hair was thick and rather coarse, a dread-locked mane that reached his shoulders, middlish brown as far as she could judge, several shades darker than his skin. His eyebrows were darker yet, extravagantly tangled angular arcs with a few white hairs shining in the brown. His mustache was dark as his brows, like them, threaded with white; it hid most of his upper lip and drooped in long, thin tails at the corners of his wide mouth. He had broad shoulders, long sleek muscles; his sleeves were rolled up, showing thick wrists and powerful, hairy forearms. A Dyslaeror. And an alpha at least, Ciocan maybe. Pippon on a crab! Tippy muh toesies in a ocean o shit. Bossman, oooeeehhh, he's coot crazy and sliding for hell.

No sane being would play games with the Dyslaera, they had a history of blood feuds that went back over a thousand years. They weren't a hasty people, they didn't take umbrage lightly, but family bonds were strong and they never gave up till they got whoever injured one of theirs. Especially the females never gave up, the Dyslaerin. If Bossman loped off so casually with an alpha male, a Ciocan, the chosen mate of a Toerfeles, a Clanmother, well, that didn't say much for Shadith's chances of surviving this game of his, whatever it was. Or of getting away from him.

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