"Michael Flynn - Wreck of The Rivers of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flynn Michael)

voice. Hands held, kisses clumsily exchanged, promises awaited but never received. Where was he now?
From her lofty view atop the cosmos, Wong thought she could almost see him, far off and receding.

And her first professor, with his clever repartee: brilliant, cynical, and, oh, so worldly. Stealing precious
moments together until, inevitably, they had stolen one too many and he, faced with ultimatum, had
chosen the safer haven of his wife.

She was caught in the undertow now, the chemical tide swept away by the Canutian brooms of
counteragents. A whirling maelstrom overwhelmed her with abandonment and loneliness. Homesickness
stopped her throat and she espied Goddard City winking in the sun as it pinwheeled around the Earth.
She had not been there in years. Her meager savings could not afford the fare; and so she tramped from
ship to ship, hoping one day to dock once more at home. But, with perverse frustration, Brownian
motion kept her suspended in the Middle System. She could see that tight, little one-room flat in the
Gamma-3 spoke where she had lived with her father and mother. She remembered the looming
immensity of Earth querning outside the viewports, all blues and whites and greens and browns; colors
so heartbreaking she wept to remember them.

Hand was dust now. Vapor jetted aft, his atoms making the Void just that much less empty. He had
rescued her, in the True Companions Bar, rescued her from the inchoate joy she had breathed and
breathed and breathed again into her sorry lungs; convoyed her while she sweated the poisons from her
blood; sustained her through the grief that followed. A jovial man, hearty, loving life; warmhearted,
talkative, radiating harmony. Had he only been awaiting an invitation she had never found the courage
to give?

Bitter tears, then, for the potential happiness never now to be converted to the kinetic sort.

True joy, Evan Hand had told the shuddering woman in the True Companions, never has a price. It is as
free and as unexpected as a budding flower.

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 TheWreckofTheRiverofStars



And, as events had shown, as passing.

Fransziska Wong huddled once again miserably in an emigrantтАЩs bunk in an abandoned stateroom. It
was dark. There had been no lights for years and electrostatics had woven the dust into crazed and
elaborate cobwebs. She shivered uncontrollably as the toxins sweated out of her.




She had never performed an autopsy on Hand. She could not bear to treat the dear man as meat. But an
exploration of the husk might have discovered his killer. Something exotic, something new or
unexpected. Some reason why his death was such a mystery to her. тАЬShip,тАЭ she said, wondering if it
were too late to stop the funeral.

There was no answer, and it struck her that even the AI might have forgotten that this portion of the craft
existed.