（外文电子版资料）George R. R. Martin - Override.pdf

OVERRIDE The only way to break free of a controlling force is to first recognize exactly what that force is . GEORGE R. R. MARTIN Dusk was settling softly over the High Lakes as Kabaraijian and his crew made their way home from the caves. It was a calm, quiet dusk; a twilight blended of green waters and mellow night winds and the slow fading of Grottos gentle sun. From the rear of his launch, Kabaraijian watched it fall, and listened to the sounds of twilight over the purring of the engine. Grotto was a quiet world, but the sounds were there, if you knew how to listen. Kabaraijian knew. He sat erect in the back of the boat, a slight figure with swarthy skin and long black hair and brown eyes that drifted dreamy. One thin hand rested on his knee, the other, forgotten, on the motor. And his ears listened; to the bubbling of the water in the wake of the launch, and the swish-splash of the lakeleapers breaking surface, and the wind moving the trailing green branches of the trees along the near shore. In time, hed hear the nightflyers, too, but they were not yet up. There were four in the boat, but only Kabaraijian listened or heard. The others, bigger men with pasty faces and vacant eyes, were long past hearing. They wore the dull gray coveralls of dead men, and there was a steel plate in the back of each mans skull. Sometimes, when his corpse controller was on, Kabaraijian could listen with their ears, and see with their eyes. But that was work, hard work, and not worth it. The sights and sounds a corpse handler felt through his crew were pale echoes of real sensation, seldom useful and never pleasurable. And now, Grottos cooling dusk, was an off-time. So Kabaraijians corpse controller was off, and his mind, disengaged from the dead men, rested easy in sits own body. The launch moved purposefully along the lake shore, but Kabaraijians thoughts wandered lazily, when he thought at a