"Forward, Robert L - Rocheworld 02 - Return to Rocheworld - with Julie Forward Fuller 5.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)

Caroline came back to herself with a start. "I've got to go to the surface to make sure its installed properly," she stated bluntly.
Shirley laughed. "Of course you're going. We're both going. I figure we have fifteen days to configure and partially assemble the communicator setup."
Tony looked closely at the frightened girl standing before him. Tall and thin, with a boyish figure, the only sign of her native American heritage was her reddish-brown coloring and the two long black braids set low on her head, covering her ears. Cinnamon was doing her best to apologize for her existence.
"Jinjur just wouldn't listen when I tried to tell her that I'm not up to piloting the SLAM II. She told me that I had better use my spare time to get a little practice in. She said that I should ask you to coach me on the simulator. But I'll understand if you have too much else to do ... maybe you could tell her that you'd rather have a back-up pilot that you knew was competent..."
Tony thought. He really didn't have any sailcraft piloting chores to do, now that they were just maintaining position near Rocheworld. He had decided that he needed to put in some time at the heavy rocket simulator himself, and it just occurred to him that the best way to relearn the proper techniques is to coach some one else.
"No," he said. "No matter who goes, they will need to refresh their memory on the simulator. We all lost a lot of experience during our time on No-Die. Why don't you and I go up to the simulator room on the engineering deck and see just how rough we've both become."
But when Tony watched Cinnamon at the simulator controls he had some misgivings. Cinnamon was more than rusty. She just didn't have the feel of the heavy thrusters. She seemed to do better when he programmed a specific sequence, but when he turned her over to James she rapidly lost her way.
"I think your problem is that the virtual reality helmet isn't able to fit around your head properly," Tony suggested kindly. "What say we take a break for today, and when you come here tomorrow, you can do something else with your hair."
The next day, Cinnamon had shifted the thick braids back on her head, exposing more of her large rounded ears. The grey dome of the helmet rested securely over her face. Tony's visor was linked to the same program as Cinnamon's, and the holographic multi-colored laser pattern before them resolved itself into an image of a SLAM bridge, complete with video console, rocket controls, and an image of Rocheworld outside the triangular cockpit windows. The array of tiny lasers built into the surface of the visor generated the same light patterns that would have crossed the visor if the real SLAM bridge had really been there. Working on the none-existent bridge of the hypothetical lander, Tony got lots of practice showing Cinnamon what she was doing wrong. But when he turned the controls back over to her for the next landing, they crashed again, even though the emergency problem James had inserted was a minor one.
"How did you get such high scores at GNASA?" he finally exploded.
Cinnamon hung her head. "I don't know. They just always tested me on the one emergency simulation that I had practiced. I knew that the examiners had certain favorite situations and I concentrated exclusively on them. I had hoped, that by doing very well on one or two tests, I could average out for the tests I would be bound to screw up. But then I just got lucky. Every single test was the one that I had studied."
Tony stared at her. "You mean you bluffed your way through the whole training program?"
She nodded. "I _do_ know how to fly light aircraft, and I'm pretty good at the _Dragonfly_ aeroplanes, but I just can't seem to get the feel of the heavy lander rockets."
"Well, you're going to get the feel now!"
He worked her hard. Hours after the agreed stopping time, he was still hovering over her, berating her mistakes. It was so frustrating to watch her do so well on one of his setups, and then fail so miserably when James presented the same scenario. Tony never had a long fuse on his temper, and by the time they were ready to quit, he was livid with rage. As he watched her struggle to lift the helmet off over her pinned up braids, the sight of Cinnamon's tear-stained face pushed Tony over the edge. With a growl of rage, he took out his pocket knife and cut off both braids.
Cinnamon looked from his eyes to the long braids still in his hand, then turned her back to him and hung her head.
Tony stared at the smooth curve of her bared neck, and down her long straight back. All his anger drained away. He watched his hand reach out and stroke her back, slowly drifting down to the small curves of her buttocks. She froze, scarcely breathing. Slowly he turned her around, and cupped her face in his hands. Then he kissed her fiercely. Taking her hand, he pulled her down the long central shaft to his room.
He undressed her slowly. She still made no move to either help or resist him. He looked at her body appraisingly. Living in zero gee usually helped the women retain their figures, but Cinnamon's small curves could never have sagged. Tony, as the only homosexual man on the ship, had had a hard time accepting the voluptuous curves of the more promiscuous women on board. Once he had fled Carmen's room without having satisfied either of them.
Cinnamon, however, reminded him of all the beautiful young men he had ever loved; young men now old or dead, forever out of his reach. He became so lost in his memories, that he was momentarily startled to be reminded that this lover before him had no penis. He turned her around, and drowned himself in his fantasies.
Cinnamon waited for Tony to fall asleep, and then gathered up her clothes and slipped back to her own room. Throughout the whole encounter, Tony had not spoken a word to her. Had she expected a declaration of love? She had at least expected the man to know it was her that he was with. She was confused, and didn't know where to go for advice. Nels? Their relationship was strictly professional. Carmen couldn't seem to handle her own love life lately. Maybe, in her ignorance, she was over reacting to the whole thing. After all, technically she was still a virgin. Cinnamon smiled ruefully and rubbed her posterior.
At noon the next day, Tony was again at the flight simulator. He made no comment about the day before, nor did he seem to notice her hair. Cinnamon had had her imp cut it into a straight bob at her jawline. She felt funny about the cut; it seemed odd to see her ears again.
They went through the simulator lesson slowly. Tony refused to program the situations, letting her struggle with James' choices. He was quick to berate her, but by the end of the session she had improved slightly.
Tony begrudgingly complimented her, and then silently led her back again to his apartment. This time Cinnamon was determined to take some initiative, and during their silent love making she rolled over and forced him to took into her eyes. Finally, at the age of 72, Cinnamon Byrd lost her virginity. Later, curled up in Tony's arms, Cinnamon heard James call to her quietly through the imp in her hair.
"Cinnamon? Is everything okay with you?"
"Yes, James, everything is fine," she whispered. "Why do you ask?"
"You have not requested a song all day," the computer responded.
"How about "The Shoop Shoop Song"?" she requested, although she didn't see why she wanted it. Tony had hardly kissed her face at all!
Jinjur, always concerned about her crew's safety, decided that before they risked sending a human crew down to Rocheworld, they would send down one of their robotic amphibious crawlers to locate and reestablish contact with the pod of flouwen that had befriended the humans during their last visit to the surface. By communicating with them through the robotic lander she could arrange for her landing party to meet the members of the pod at some selected point on the "Hawaiian Islands", the small group of meteorite craters sticking up out of the shallow part of the ocean on the outer pole of Eau.
"We need to let the flouwen know that the crawler is coming," said George. "We don't want it to end up entangled as an undigestible lunch in some voracious wildlife." He shuddered, remembering his close call with the exploding, grey, rock-like creature that had trapped him with its sticky threads and tried to eat him. "Caroline, can we use one of the communication lasers to contact them from here?"
"Certainly," Caroline replied. "The one we are preparing for them to use would be ideal."
"They communicate sonically," Shirley objected. "The translation programs in our vehicle computers can talk with the flouwen through a sonar transmitter, but it won't work with a laser transmitter since the flouwen have no method of converting the light fluctuations into sound fluctuations. Also, as far as I know, we never developed any sort of Morse Code so we could send messages with dots and dashes of light. They are sensitive to light, however, so all we need to do is find the right type of modulation."
"They're mathematicians," said George. "Maybe we can send them dot-dash pictures broken into raster scans using a frame size with prime numbers for width and height. Once they realize the repetition pattern, their mathematical brains should be able to organize it into a two-dimensional picture."
"We can do better than that." Caroline was thinking hard as she spoke. "Didn't one of the flouwen develop an 'eye' like we humans use?"
"Yes," confirmed Shirley. "I had a long talk with White Whistler when I was riding on him. He is the one that learned to turn part of his body into a clear lens that would focus the light from the stars onto a portion of his light sensitive body. He used the artificial eye to study the spectra of the stars and follow the orbital movements of Gargantua and its moons. He was pleased to learn that he was correct in his deduction that the _Prometheus_ wasn't a natural satellite since it didn't move in an elliptical orbit."
"Well, since he can see like a human, perhaps we can use the laser to send him a picture of the crawler landing by some distinctive point on the outer islands," Caroline continued. "Although the laser sends only a single dot of light, we can make the dot move quickly enough to give the illusion of a line. By reflecting it off a rapidly vibrating mirror, we can even do simple animation. It would have to be a simple figure, and we would have no way of knowing for sure if they received our message..."
"But it's certainly worth a try," George decided. "It will also give us a good opportunity to test out the laser itself. Is it almost complete?"
"Caroline and I have most of it put together," Shirley confirmed.
"You might want to ask Greystoke help you out," said George. "As an award-winning sonovideo composer, he should be able to come up with a simple, yet comprehensible, animated message."
"Maybe he can also come up with some good idea to get the flouwen's attention," said Shirley. "The animation idea needs a screen to write the images on. Some of the tall cliffs on the islands would be ideal movie screens, but how do we attract an audience there to see them?"
Barnard had just set behind Eau, and the sky was dark and clear above the oceans of Eau. Floating in the star-speckled sky was Roche, illuminated in an arc on one side as the shadow of Eau crept across its surface. Off to one side was the giant gas planet Gargantua, with its large retinue of moons. Clear^White^Whistle was showing Dainty() Blue()Warbler how to make an eye for looking with. Roaring*Hot*Vermillion was protesting loudly.
*I still think it is perverted to make part of yourself clear unless you are making a new one!*
^It is not perverted if it leads to new understanding,^ the white flouwen countered. ^With the clear part you can focus the lights from the sky on to the rest of yourself and look farther than you can see.^
() I want to look,() the youngest flouwen decided. () Let me taste how you make this 'eye'.()
Clear^White^Whistle gave the youngling a sample of memory juices. After a moment, Dainty()Blue()Warbler formed a clear spot in its jelly-like body.
^Good! Now be sure that there is no water on the surface of your lens to distort the light. The light in the shape of a crescent is SkyRock. The big circle surrounded by little circles is Warm. Off to one side is the FlyingCircle that the humans live in. All the rest of the tiny points of light are called stars.^
() Wow! The whole sky is as crowded as the rest of the world! What is the FlyingCircle doing? It is flashing like an earthquake! Does it always do that?()
^I have never seen it do that before.^ Clear^White^Whistle was puzzled.
Roaring*Hot*Vermillion quickly formed and eye to look too. *It is getting brighter!*
()It is coming right at us!()
The beam of blue-green light, visible in the forward scattering from the salt specks in the air, flashed rapidly again and again as it stepped its way across the ocean, swept over the three flouwen, and marched off toward the distant horizon.