"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 04 - Seeds of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

Seeds of Destiny
by Thomas A. Easton
This story copyright 1994 by Thomas A. Easton. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.




* * *


CHAPTER 1

"Sir?"
A hand reached toward Marcus Aurelius Hrecker from a shadowy alcove in the painted tunnel wall.
Automatically, he raised a warding arm and shifted his step to stay out of reach. Olympia, burrowed into
the bulk of the grandest mountain in the Solar System, was as safe as any place, safer than any city on
Earth or the Moon. But you could never tell. Even in a crowded tunnel.
"Sir? Please!"
The hand belonged to a small woman, stooped and wrinkled and smelling of years. Her hair was so
gray it was practically white. Almost against his will, he stopped and faced her. Other pedestrians flowed
past behind him.
 "Did you know I'm being evicted? I had such a nice apartment. And they say they need it for someone
else. They're putting me in a home. Just one room and a cafeteria and a lounge full of old wrecks. Like
me."
"I'm sorry." He shook his head. "But there's really nothing I can do." Why was she even telling him?
He didn't know her, and he could imagine no reason why she would think he might change the housing
office's mind. Certainly he couldn't take her home with him. His own apartment was barely large enough
for him.
"Of course you can't!" She nodded rapidly, her eyes bright, her mouth set in a pursed line. "Not about
that. But..." She reached into the shadows behind her. Light glinted on polished metal wheel-hubs and
basket wire. He recognized a cart of the sort many people used when shopping. "I have to get rid of my
flowers, you know. I can't take them with me. They just won't allow it. There's no point in even asking.
But you look like a nice fellow."
She swung back toward him, something in her hands. He shied away from her, stepping backward,
thumping into a passerby, lurching forward again, and she thrust that something against his chest. "Here."
Suddenly he was holding a smooth-sided cylinder and staring at a spray of fuzzy green and white-edged,
yellow-centered violet.
Oh, no, he thought. Fear washed over him even as his fingertips stroked the side of the cylinder and
told him it was made of some smooth ceramic. It was surely a local product, made of Martian soil. No
one shipped raw clay or pottery between the worlds, not even in an era when Q drives tapped the raw
energy of space itself to power rockets.
No one made flowerpots either, and here was the handle and now it made sense.
"Here," she said again, and her nod was insistent, demanding, dogmatic. "You can have an African
violet. All it needs is light and water, and maybe a little fertilizer."
But he was not listening. "No!" he cried. "You keep it! I can't!"
He pushed the mug full of greenery toward the old woman, but she seized his wrists and with
surprising strength turned him toward the center of the tunnel. "No," she said. "I really can't, you know.