"Asaro, Catherine - Echea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asaro Catherine)

Echea who was, for all intents and
purposes, still a stranger.

And an unknown one at that.

I made myself smile, made the next words
come out lightly. "I suspect there are
provisions against killing us in our
beds."

Her eyes widened, then instantly filled
with tears. "I would never do that," she
said.

And I believed her.

As she grew more comfortable with me, she
told me about her previous life. She spoke
of it only in passing, as if the things
that happened before no longer mattered to
her. But in the very flatness with which
she told them, I could sense deep emotions
churning beneath the surface.

The stories she told were hair-raising.
She had not, as I had assumed, been
orphaned as an infant. She had spent most
of her life with a family member who had
died, and then she had been brought to
Earth. Somehow, I had believed that she
had grown up in an orphanage like the ones
from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, the ones Dickens wrote about,
and the famous pioneer filmmakers had made
Flats about. I had not realized that those
places did not exist on the Moon. Either
children were chosen for adoption, or they
were left to their own devices, to survive
on their own if they could.

Until she had moved in with us, she had
never slept in a bed. She did not know it
was possible to grow food by planting it,
although she had heard rumors of such
miracles.

She did not know that people could accept
her for what she was, instead of what she
could do for them.