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

"How about a three-way wrestling match?" called Richard.
"Just so you can cream us?" retorted Thomas. "No, thank you."
"You're right, it wouldn't give me much of a workout." Richard preened playfully.
"How about the two of us against you?" offered Sam. Although very tall and thin, Sam knew that all his field work in the heavy spacesuits on Luna and Mars had given his lanky body hidden strength. Sam was hoping that, with a bit of help, he could give his friend the comeuppance he deserved. Richard was his greatest pal, but he was inclined to be cocky.
"Two against one is hardly fair ... for you," Richard scoffed. "Maybe with Jinjur on your team..." He turned his back incitingly. With savage growls the two other men threw themselves at him, but at the last second Richard dodged out of their way. Unfortunately, he had underestimated Sam's reach and a large knuckled hand grasped Richard around the ankle and sent him spinning. Soon the three of them were locked in mock combat, a twisting ball of intermingled white, brown, and red flesh.
Cinnamon was on her way to the sick bay when she met Carmen just outside the door.
"Are you here to be ravished by the pump?" Carmen asked. She shuddered slightly. With no gravity to help them, the women on board had to use a menstrual extractor each month. Like all women who had been in close contact for an extended time, their hormonal cycles had synchronized and the sick bay needed only to be set up for the procedure one or two days a month.
"Yes," Cinnamon answered. "I once swore that I would never perform this procedure on myself. Why else would I stay a virgin all the way through college?" _And a good deal later_, she added mentally.
"What are you talking about?" Carmen asked. "Surely you didn't ever operate a menstrual extractor back on good old Terra Firma?"
"Don't call me Shirley," said Cinnamon in automatic response to the old joke. Then she pulled herself back to the conversation. "I became an expert on operating a menstrual extractor when I was a medic back in Alaska. The extractor will remove the uterine lining even if it is _not_ time for the women's period; even if the woman was supposed to have _no_ period. When the Supreme Court decided that life, and citizenship, began at conception, whom else could the local women turn to? To go to my father for an abortion meant facing a jail term." She failed to notice the shock on her companion's face.
"Dad knew what I was doing, of course, and while he managed to avoid turning in all the women who suddenly found the IUDs in them were now illegal, he couldn't take any more direct action himself. If he had lost his license, the town would have been left with no medical care at all. Thank the gods that particular craziness didn't last too long."
"You performed abortions?!" Carmen screamed. All of her early upbringing merged with her current desire for children and rose up in a wave of revulsion. "How could you!? It was bad enough that those judges, estos santos, were martyred for their convictions! People like you abortionists kept on killing the babies!"
Cinnamon was stunned. "Where were you in 2015? I saved the women who had decided that they simply couldn't face having a baby. Without my help, they would have found some other way to stop the pregnancy. The Thomas decision meant that almost all forms of birth control were outlawed ... IUDs, Norplant, the Pill, anything that would keep a fertilized egg from implanting. Condoms and spermicide where all that was allowed and in the rural areas it was impossible to stay supplied. I kept those women from poisoning themselves with rue or tansy, or from trying to break their water with knitting needles and puncturing their wombs instead.
"Finally, the country woke up to the power they had given to the extremists during all those conservative administrations. We had been too worried with world affairs to be concerned with who was safekeeping our own laws, and it was almost too late. Sure, the next election brought in anyone who promised to be pro-choice, but those on the Supreme Court were there for life. When the first bomb ripped through the courthouse I admit I cheered. Maybe only one justice was killed, but the truth was out. All the judges had prices on their heads and they weren't ready to pay the ultimate price for their beliefs. Four others resigned with in the year, but for as long as that decision remained in power, women were literally dying in despair. I am proud that I managed to save some of them."
Carmen was horrified. She pushed herself away from Cinnamon and headed back toward the lounge. Tears clouded her vision and her face was red with rage and revulsion.
Cinnamon watched her go, and shook her head sadly. When the country decided that it had done something foolish, it rectified it, and then tried to forget. It seemed odd to Cinnamon that there existed anyone who still denied the fundamental truth that abortions occurred, no matter what the laws were. She pushed herself in to the medical lab and checked to see that the extractor was sterile and reset. Then she disrobed and lay back on the table as a portion of the Christmas Bush approached her bearing a long slim tube. Cinnamon forced herself to relax, and allowed the tube to slide gently into position. The whole procedure took only ten minutes and then it was all over. Cinnamon filled the time worrying about her relationship with Tony and humming softly to herself.
"Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken..."
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*CHAPTER THREE -- RETURNING*
()Look! Look! Look!() Dainty()Blue()Warble's cry echoed through the water. Long after the others had gotten bored with watching the sky and had gone to hunt some food, the young flouwen kept his lens focused on the skies overhead. Finally he saw the aeroshell carrying the lander, glowing with the heat of entry, streak across the sky.
()The humans are coming! The humans are coming!()
^Where?^ asked Clear^White^Whistle as he rapidly formed a looking lens of his own. Long practice made the formation of a clear sphere of tissue almost automatic.
*Fractals!* cursed Roaring*Hot*Vermillion. He was having trouble with his eye, but after a moment he finally got the skies in focus.
Crack! A sonic boom cut through the air as the aeroshell passed overhead. Then, with a splash, the probe announced its arrival to all those living in the water. It sank to the bottom. Almost immediately, the aeroshell was surrounded by the curious flouwen, each one jockeying for a taste of the strange artifact.
The acoustic sensors of the crawler heard the crowd of strange voices examining it with complex sonar chirps.
()I cannot see inside it. It is as hard as a rock.()
*Look! It is crawling out of its shell!*
Using its flippered tread, the crawler left the aeroshell and then adjusted its buoyancy to match the density of the ammonia-water sea. By neither sinking nor floating, it allowed itself to be gently passed from flouwen to flouwen so that they would become accustom to it before the humans regained control.
*Hello! Hello!* Roaring*Hot*Vermillion surrounded the rowboat-sized vehicle and shook it gently as he roared at it. *The CrawlingRock is so small! How do all the humans fit in there!?!*
^Think before you speak!^ Clear^White^Whistle chastised. ^This is just another pet of the humans. Can't you taste how much it is like the winged FloatingRock? The humans do all their talking through such pets as this.^
The milky flouwen reached into the reddish blob and tried to pry the crawler out of his grasp. After a short struggle, only long enough for Roaring*Hot*Vermillion to prove that Clear^White^Whistle could not have forced the removal, Roaring*Hot*Vermillion released the crawler to the other.
^Hello? Shirley? Katrina? Are you listening?^
The computer in the crawler translated the sonic trills of the white flouwen and used its blue-green laser communicator to transmit the flouwen's question up through the water to the humans waiting above on _Prometheus_.
"We are here," answered Shirley. "We want for you to carry our crawler close to the shore where we can communicate better with you and with the elders. Take it toward the beaches where elders think, and show us a spot where our crawler will be safe under the tides, and can rest comfortably on the ocean bottom."
*Why does it want to be on the bottom? It will get all sandy there.* Roaring*Hot*Vermillion was still trying to work the tiny irritants from his body that he picked up when he was slammed into the bottom by the churning surf of the north shore.
"We have something to show you," Shirley's voice interrupted. "We are sending you a touchscreen console that will help us communicate more clearly. It would help us if the console were set down somewhere stable."
<>I know of a quiet bay,<> offered Warm<>Amber<>Resonance. <>I often go there to practice body plays so we will not be fighting the currents. It is one of the favorite places for elders that will only be rocked up to think for a short while, since for long periods of thought the tides are too mild. We can go there.<>
Sensing no disagreement, the large white flouwen holding the crawler streaked off toward the cove, followed closely by the rest of the Pod. Clear^White^Whistle was the only one to maintain his eye and he closely scrutinised the crawler as he carried it along. The crawler was not heavy, but its awkward shape slowed the flouwen down. Dainty()Blue()Warble hung back from the rest of the pod and kept his tutor company.
()These are certainly interesting times to be alive.() ^Indeed. You even owe your individuality to the coming of the humans. I have decided to make the StiffMovers the subject of my research. Perhaps you too, would like to study them seriously.^
()Certainly there is much to learn about them. You say they build devices such as this CrawlingRock? It seems odd to use one's energy to change the shape of things instead of using one's mind to understand them as they are.()
Before too long, the pod had their prize installed in the shallow cove. Here, sheltered by high cliffs on three sides and by a reef on the fourth, the usual high waves of Eau were tamed into gentle swells. They softly lapped the shore which was studded with several colorful 'rocks' of thinking flouwen. They settled the crawler onto the soft sands on the bottom, in water just deep enough for a flouwen to float comfortably.
The crawler adjusted its density until it sank in the water and its treads were firmly embedded in the sand. From its rear, there rose a mast that extended out of the water. At the end of the mast, well above the wave tops, was a small laser transmitter that locked onto the commsat _Walter_ hovering at the L-4 point just visible right on the horizon. Using one of its claw-like manipulators, the crawler reached over its back and opened up a cargo hold that was normally used for storing samples picked up during an exploration mission.
Inside the hold was the prototype of the custom touchscreen so carefully constructed by John, Carmen, and Caroline back on the _Prometheus_. The basic case of the custom console was that of a videoboard, the modernistic version of the old-time clipboard. A standard videoboard was a thin but stiff high resolution display screen the size of a standard piece of paper that operated by reflection in daylight and illumination at night. You could talk to it, write on it, move or touch menu icons on the screen with your finger, or punch in letters and numbers on keyboard icons along the bottom. In turn, the videoboard could show you anything it could access, or had stored in its memory.
Besides having a built-in flouwen-human translation program, this custom videoboard could also input two-dimensional sound, touch, and chemical patterns, and output sonar patterns that matched the underlying video patterns. The electrochemical receptors of the videoboard were still crude in both spatial and chemical resolution, but Nels and John had designed them to be adaptable, and hoped to refine their resolution as they and the flouwen got used to the strange interface between a culture who used chemical smells and tastes solely for gastronomy and a culture who used them in place of reference books.
As an introduction, to teach the flouwen how to use the videoboard, the screen replayed the picture of Rocheworld rotating around and around, with the ellipse of _Prometheus_ off to one side, and a human spacecraft flying from the sailship to land on the outer pole of Eau.
"Where is FloatingCircle?" trilled the videoboard in passable flouwen. "Touch the FloatingCircle."
The flouwen clustered around, each one eager to try using the odd device. It wasn't long before they had moved on from simple pictures to complex mathematical discussions. Sweet$Green$Fizz was especially impressed with an imaginary sonovideo trip from the surface of Eau, out into space where the whole of the Barnard planetary system could be seen going through its gyrations, followed by an imaginary trip from Barnard back to Sol, a flyby of all the planets and moons in the solar system, and a landing on the shores of the blue-green oceans of Earth.
$What a marvelous pet! If only I could train my PrettySmells to obey so well!$
^This is no natural pet, but one that had been built in order to do the humans' bidding. It is not alive.^ Long ago during the first visit of the humans to Rocheworld, Katrina had explained the human habit of manipulating their environment to the technologically primitive flouwen, but Clear^White^Whistle hadn't bothered to share the taste of the memory with the frivolous Sweet$Green$Fizz.
$They change the nature of their pets?$ Struggling to understand the strange idea, the green blob hardened into a rock and sank to the bottom, lost in thought.