"Duane, Diane - Tos - Spock's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

it on the hook beside where the door had been. Beneath it his
tabard and trousers were dark too, somewhere between brown and
black, his family's sigil bound into the fabric in
gold at the tabard's-throat. It was diplomatic
uniform, made more impressive by his stature,
tall but not slender anymore-late maturity had
left its mark on his frame. His looks somewhat
matched his dress; a man dark-haired, dark-eyed,
deep-eyed, a hawk-faced man with no expression
. . . at least none that most people here were competent
to read. There was energy in the way he held himself, some
of those people would have said . . . perhaps too much energy,
bound in check by a frightening control. They never knew
how tight a control; they never knew how it
slipped, sometimes, and left their thoughts open to him.
He would have been embarrassed, except that he
considered himself neither a child, a brute beast,
or an alien, to be so possessed by an emotion.
He turned and paused again, gazing out the window at
the brass-and-gold afternoon lying over the browned lawns
outside. It was approaching sunset of what the people
who lived in this part of the world considered a ferociously
hot day, much too hot for spring. Several times
today, various of them had said apologetically to him,
"At least it's dry heat." They need not have been
apologetic. To him this was a fair day in early
spring indeed, cool, bracing, with a hundred kinds of
plant in exuberant leaf; it reminded him of
hunting mornings in his youth.
Eidetic memory has its prices. For a
moment, whether he wished it or not, he found himself out
on the plain again under the burning sky, smelling the
air, terrified and out of control of the emotion, knowing that
at the day's end he would either be a man or be dead.
Then the fragment of memory, like a still holograph
refiled, fell back into its indexed place in his
mind. He lifted an eyebrow at his
self-indulgence, made a note to himself to spend a
little extra time in the Disciplines that evening, and moved
to the terminal.
Its chiming stopped as he touched it: another
second and the terminal had read his EEG through
his skin, recognizing the pattern, The screen
filled with column on column of blue
symbology, a list of calls to the flat since he
left. Most of them were unimportant compared to the one
name and commcode at the far right-hand side of the list, the
most recent, the one message that had caused the
"urgent" chime. He had rather been hoping that the
embassy would not need him further today: but hope was