"Michael Kandel - Hooking Up" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kandel Michael)

grew up here, but she doesn't remember Earth. Let's not push her. Let's give her
time, and all the room she needs. Her father said more than once: Fine, fine, I
agree. But Topaz could tell that he wasn't pleased. He wanted his daughter to
grow up more quickly than she was growing up.

Topaz felt nervous about going to school, afraid that the children and Ms. C.
would know all about her cowardice at the glass building. But no one referred to
it or hinted at it, so maybe they didn't know. The class had a lesson about
fractions and percentages in the form of a game, where they all had to stand in
different parts of the room and move around according to the numbers Ms. C.
wrote on the board, and Topaz was one of the few who didn't make any mistakes.
In the fenced-in park, during the lunch hour, she played the leap-frog game with
Cherry and Anemone and another girl who joined them. The other girl's name was
Iris.

In the afternoon, Ms. C. had a man come from an important company and tell the
children about the future of compuvision. He had a wonderful voice and said that
someday, and not too long, either, people wouldn't need sets to watch
compuvision, they could just close their eyes and think a keyword to get a menu
in their head. His company was developing a new, improved plon that would join
with the plon the children already had. As the man talked, Topaz saw Iris finger
her head behind an ear and a little up diagonally, and Topaz fingered her own
head there and imagined the plon going in. It wasn't so bad, she told herself.
Why was she being such a baby about such a little thing?

Lance came and talked to her again in the hall after school. She knew that he
had come especially to talk to her, and she heard one of her new friends say,
behind her, Look, Topaz has a boyfriend. She supposed that Lance was her
boyfrier, d. It made her feel very grown-up. As they walked toward the upper
shuttle stop together, Lance actually took her hand, maybe because of what the
girl said, and Topaz let him hold it. She thought: Will he still like me when I
get hooked up? Because it seemed to her that he cared about her the way people
care about a person who is ill or very old or who can't see and has to get
around with a white cane and one of those ear aids that make echoes. There was
something nice about his caring, but at the same time there was something not
nice about it.

At home, she told her mother that she was all right now about the plon and
wanted to be hooked up like everyone else. Her mother nodded, not at all
surprised, as if she had been expecting Topaz to change her mind, and made
another appointment. To make the appointment, her mother talked into the air,
not on the phone as before, so Topaz knew that their family was on the net now
and that soon, after the operation, she would be able to talk to Cherry without
a modem. She repeated to herself: Cherry fifty-seven Z slash two. Maybe they
would play interactive games, too, in their heads together.

It was the day before her appointment, a Tuesday, in the afternoon, when the
crash happened. The children were in the hall during a break, and suddenly they
all fell down. Topaz got down on the floor, too, thinking that this was a new
activity no one had told her about, a game or maybe a joke. Or maybe it was an