"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

nuthouse, I could have had that. Even in the middle of the slide, I had Iris, even if I had her all confused in
my head with my mother and Evelyn and every other woman who had ever shown me kindness.
├Дt
"What's Evelyn like?" I asked my father once, a year or so before we slipped into orbit around the planet
we would name Canaan, and long before I knew I'd already been talking to her.

He couldn't answer. The accident was too recent, his mind still too scrambled by guilt and desperate
hope and the wrenching dislocation he felt whenever he left her to spend time with me. I never asked him
again, and thought I'd never find out.

Funny how things happen.
├Дt
The first time I asked Iris out on a kind of date, she said yes, as long as she could bring her little siblings
along. This was humbling, but I was so gone over her that I said sure. Hannah and Peter were then six
and five years old. I was fourteen. We were going to the farmer's market and then a movie; some of the
older colonists had formed a film society that showed old movies in the school gym. They were slipping
into the Fifties psychosis that eventually doomed Grant City, but at this point, before they'd left the shuttle
pad to get weedy so they could build a movie theater, they had a sense of humor about the whole thing,
mostly screening corny science-fiction movies that had the effect of making us all feel advanced and smart
and a little bit heroic.

I'd expected the kids to be a burden, but I surprised myself by enjoying their company almost as much as
Iris's. Of course I was trying to be nice to them so I could score points with Iris, but pretty soon I didn't
have to try. They were just a joy to be around, full of questions that made me feel important because I
could answer most of them and other questions that put me happily in touch with the little-kid state of
wonderment over everything. Why were green beans and kidney beans both called beans? Why didn't
pineapples grow on pine trees? Who knew, and who cared when you could revel in the innocent
goofiness of the question? We ate barbecued chicken and hand-churned ice cream, and Hannah and
Peter asked me a dozen times each if I was their sister's boyfriend. "You better ask her," I said, and
couldn't breathe until she'd said yes, I was.

The evening's movie was The Blob. During the scene in the movie theater, when the titular red goo
poured out of the projection booth over the doomed kids necking in the back rows, Iris leaned over and
whispered in my ear, "Guess we better be careful."

I don't remember anything else about the movie except looking over once to see Hannah and Peter
wide-eyed and swept away.
├Дt
I know you know most of this already. All I have to offer that's new is me. My feelings, my perspectives.

Before we planted anything, we had the genelabs up and running, and we cultured seeds that wouldn't
spread disease or be vulnerable to native strains. And for a while it worked; near the cemetery where my
mother was buried, there was a cornfield. The only one I've ever seen. I used to climb the hill above it
and look down on the rows of green stalks, watching the leaves ripple in smooth arcs as breezes swept
down the valley. Canaan's amino acids were mostly left-handed, but we'd figured out a way to break the
protein chains and turn them around. This absorbed a large part of each plant's energy, but with careful
management the crops came in, smaller than they would have been on Earth but edible and nutritious.
Our breeds of cattle and chickens seemed to be working too, and about a year after we landedтАФthis
was 2251 by the Earth calendarтАФwe had a Thanksgiving. We were surviving.