"Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace (V1)Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Amelia held my hand that week, and we were holding each other soon enough.

I don't usually fall asleep right after making love, but this time I did, after the weekend of dissipation and the sleepless hours on the planeЧyou'd think a person who spent a third of his life as part of a machine would be comfortable traveling inside another one, but no. I have to stay awake to keep the damned thing in the air.

The smell of onions woke me up. Brunch, lunch, whatever. Amelia has a thing about potatoes; her Irish blood, I suppose. She was frying up a pan with onions and garlic. Not my favorite wake-up call, but for her it was lunch. She told me she'd gotten up at three to log on and work out a decay sequence that turned out to be nothing. So her reward for working on Sunday was a shower, a somewhat awake lover, and fried potatoes.

I located my shirt but couldn't find my pants, and settled on one of her nightgowns, not too pretty. We were the same size.

I found my blue toothbrush in her bathroom and used her weird clove-flavored toothpaste. Decided against a shower because my stomach was growling. It wasn't grits and gravy, but it wasn't poison.

"Good morning, bright eyes." No wonder I couldn't find my pants. She was wearing them.

"Have you gone completely strange?" I said.

"Just an experiment." She stepped over and held me by both shoulders. "You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous."

"What experiment? See what I would wear?"

"See whether." She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back to her potatoes wearing only a T-shirt. "I mean, really. Your generation is so prudish."

"Oh, are we?" I slipped off the gown and came up behind her. "Come on. I'll show you prudish."

"That doesn't count." She half-turned and kissed me. "The experiment was about clothes, not sex. Sit down before one of us gets burned."

I sat down at the dinette and looked at her back. She stirred the food slowly. "I'm not sure why I did that, really. Impulse. Couldn't sleep but didn't want to wake you up, going through the closet. I stepped on your jeans getting out of bed and I just put them on."

"Don't explain. I want it to be a big perverse mystery."

"If you want coffee you know where it is." She had a pot of tea brewed. I almost asked for a cup. But to keep the morning from being too full of mystery, I stuck with coffee.

"So Macro's getting a divorce?" Dr. "Mac" Roman was dean of research and titular head of our project, though he wasn't involved in the day-to-day work.

"Deep dark secret. He hasn't told anybody. My friend Nel passed it on." Nel Nye was a schoolmate who worked for the city.

"And they were such a lovely couple together." She laughed one "ha," stabbing at the potatoes with the spatula. "Was it another woman, man, robot?"

"They don't put that on the form. They're splitting this week, though, and I have to meet with him tomorrow before we go to Budget. He'll be even more distracted than usual." She divided the potatoes between two plates and brought them over. "So you were out blowing up trucks?"

"Actually, I was lying in a cage, twitching." She dismissed that with a wave. "There wasn't much to it. No drivers or passengers. Two saps."

"Sapients?"

"'Sapient defense units,' yeah, but that puts a pretty low threshold on sapience. They're just guns on tracks with AI routines that give them a certain degree of autonomy. Pretty effective against ground troops and conventional artillery and air support. Don't know what they were doing in our AO."

"Is that a blood type?" she said over her teacup.

"Sorry. 'Area of operations.' I mean, one flyboy could have taken them out in a single treetop pass."

"So why didn't they use a flyboy? Rather than risk damaging your expensive armored carcass."