Robert J. Sawyer - Quintaglio 3 - Foreigner

VIP免费

2024-11-30 0 0 504.33KB 271 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Foreigner

Book 3 of the Quintaglio Trilogy

by Robert J. Sawyer

Major Characters

Capital City

Afsan (Sal-Afsan)--advisor to Dy-Dybo

Cadool (Pal-Cadool)--aide to Afsan

Dybo (Dy-Dybo)--Emperor

Edklark (Det-Edklark)--Master of the Faith

Mokleb (Nav-Mokleb)--psychoanalyst

Mondark (Dar-Mondark)--palace healer

Osfik (Var-Osfik)--Arbiter of the Sequence

Pettit--Afsan's apprentice

Geological Survey of Land

Babnol (Wab-Babnol)--team member

Biltog (Mar-Biltog)--mate aboard the Dasheter

Keenir (Var-Keenir)--captain of the Dasheter

Toroca (Kee-Toroca)--leader, Afsan's son

Exodus Project

Deplas (Bar-Delpas)--project staff member

Garios (Den-Garios)--project staff member

Karshirl (Bos-Karshirl)--engineer

Novato (Wab-Novato)--leader, inventor of the far-seer

Others

Captain--sailor

Jawn--teacher

Morb--security chief

Taksan--eggling

Prologue

Historically, there have been three great blows to the Quintaglio

ego.

First, Afsan delivered the cosmological blow by taking God out of

our skies and moving us from the center of the universe to one of

its countless backwaters.

Then, Toroca dealt us the biological blow, showing that we were not

divinely created from the hands of God but rather had evolved

through natural processes from other animals.

And, finally, Mokleb administered the psychological blow, proving

that we were not rational beings acting on lofty principles but are in

fact driven by the dark forces that control our subconscious minds.

—Briz-

Tolharb, Curator

Museum of Quintaglio Civilization

*1*

Afsan couldn't see the sun, but he felt its noontime heat beating

down. With his left hand he held the harness attached to Gork, his

large monitor lizard. They were moving over paving stones, Afsan's

toeclaws making heavy clicks against them, Cork's footfalls echoing

that sound with a softer ticking. Afsan heard metal-rimmed wheels

rolling over the roadway, approaching from the right.

Afsan had been blind for twenty kilodays. Det-Yenalb, the Master of

the Faith, had pierced Afsan's eyeballs with a ceremonial obsidian

dagger. The priest had rotated the blade in each socket, gouging

out the empty sacks. Afsan didn't like thinking about that long-ago

day. He'd been convicted of heresy, and the blinding had been

performed in Capital City's Central Square in front of over a

hundred people, a mob packed with as little as three paces between

each of its members.

The city had changed since then. The landquake of kiloday 7110

had destroyed many roads and buildings, and the replacements

were often different from the originals. The growth and

redevelopment of the city had left their marks, too. Still, Afsan

always knew where he was in relation to the Central Square. Even

now, having to walk through it made him anxious. But today's

journey would take him nowhere near—

Roots!

Suddenly Afsan felt his middle toeclaw catch on something—a loose

paving stone?—and he found himself pitching forward, his tail lifting

off the ground.

Gork let out a loud hiss as Afsan, desperately trying to right

himself, yanked hard on the lizard's harness.

From ahead, a shout: "Watch out!"

Another voice, a different passerby: "He's going to be crushed!"

A loud roar—a hornface?—dead ahead.

Afsan's chest scraped across the pavement.

The sound of cracking leather.

The hornface again.

A snap from his shoulder.

A jab of pain.

His muzzle smashing into the ground.

Blood in his mouth.

Two curving teeth knocked loose.

And then, an explosion within his head as something heavy kicked

into it.

His head whipped sideways. His neck felt like it was going to snap.

Crunching sounds.

More pain.

Indescribable pain.

A scream from the roadside.

More teeth knocked out.

Afsan was unable to breathe through one nostril. He felt as if that

whole side of his upper muzzle had been crushed.

Running feet.

Afsan let out a moan.

A stranger's voice: "Are you all right?"

Afsan tried to lift his head. Agony. His shoulder blade was a knife,

slicing into his neck. His head was slick with blood.

The high-pitched voice of a youngster: "It's Sal-Afsan!"

Another voice. "By the Face of God, it is."

And a third voice: "Oh, my God. His head—Sal-Afsan, are you all

right?"

More running sounds, toeclaws sparking against paving stones.

Agony.

"You ran right over him!"

"He stumbled in front of my chariot. I tried to stop."

Chariot. The wheels he'd heard. The hornface must have been

drawing it. The kick to his head—a hornface's forefoot. Afsan tried

to speak, but couldn't. He felt blood coursing out of him.

"The left side of his face is smashed," said the youngster. "And

look—there's something funny about his shoulder."

Another voice. "Dislocated, I'm sure."

"Is he dead?" called a new voice.

"No. Not yet, anyway. Look at his skull!"

Afsan tried to speak again, but all he managed was a low hiss.

"Someone get a healer!"

"No, it would take too long to fetch a doctor; we've got to take him

to one."

"The palace surgery isn't far," said one of the voices. "Surely Sal-

Afsan would be a patient of the imperial healer, what's his name..."

"Mondark," said another voice. "Dar-Mondark."

"Take him in your chariot," shouted a voice.

"Someone will have to help me," said the charioteer. "He's too

heavy for me to lift on my own."

Silence, except for Afsan's labored breathing and, nearby, Cork's

confused hissing.

"For God's sake, people, someone help me! I can't do this alone."

An incredulous voice. "To touch another..."

"He'll die if he doesn't get medical help. Come on."

A new voice, from farther away. "Make room for me to pass. I'm

just back from a hunt. I suspect I can touch him without difficulty."

Shuffling feet. Afsan moaned again.

The charioteer's voice now, close to his earhole: "We're going to

touch you, Sal-Afsan. Try not to react."

Even in agony, even with a broken skull and dislocated shoulder,

instinct still reigned. Afsan flinched as hands touched him.

Fingerclaws popped from their sheaths.

"Careful of his shoulder—"

Afsan howled in pain.

"Sorry. He's pretty heavy."

Afsan felt his head being pulled out of the thickening puddle of

blood. He was lifted up and placed facedown in the back of the

chariot.

"What about his lizard?" said the charioteer.

"I'll take him," said the youngster who had first identified Afsan. "I

know where the palace surgery is."

The charioteer shouted, "Latark!" His hornface began to gallop

along the road, Afsan's head bouncing up and down, the sound of

metal wheels over the stones drowning out his moans.

After an eternity, the chariot arrived outside Dar-Mondark's surgery,

a typical adobe building just south of the palace. Afsan could hear

the charioteer disembark and the sound of his fingerclaws clicking

against the signaling plate set into the doorjamb. The door swung

open on squeaky hinges, and Afsan heard Mondark's voice. "Yes?"

"I'm Gar-Reestee," said the charioteer. "I've got Sal-Afsan with me.

He's hurt."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ForeignerBook3oftheQuintaglioTrilogybyRobertJ.SawyerMajorCharactersCapitalCityAfsan(Sal-Afsan)--advisortoDy-DyboCadool(Pal-Cadool)--aidetoAfsanDybo(Dy-Dybo)--EmperorEdklark(Det-Edklark)--MasteroftheFaithMokleb(Nav-Mokleb)--psychoanalystMondark(Dar-Mondark)--palacehealerOsfik(Var-Osfik)--Arbiterofthe...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert J. Sawyer - Quintaglio 3 - Foreigner.pdf

共271页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert J. Sawyer - Quintaglio 3 - Foreigner

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: