"James Patrick Kelly - Bernardo's House" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

her drawers out of her dresser in her bedroom and set them sailing on her lap pool. She liked the way
they bucked and bumped into one another when she turned her jets on. She had never understood why
Bernardo had bought four kitchen chairs, if it was just supposed to be the two of them, but never mind.
She overrode the defaults on her clothes processor and entered the measurements of her chairs. She
made the cutest lace chemises for two of them and slipped them side-by-side in Bernardo's bedтАФbut
facing chastely away from each other. Something tingled at the edge of her consciousness, like a leaky
faucet or ants in her bread drawer or...

Her motion detectors blinked. Someone had just passed her main gate. Bernardo.

With a thrill of horror she realized that all her lights were on. She didn't think they could be seen from
outside but still, Bernardo would be furious with her. She was supposed to be his secret getaway. And
what would he say when he saw her like this? The reunion she had waited forтАФlonged forтАФwould be
ruined. And all because she had been weak. She had to put things right. The drawers first. One of them
had become waterlogged and had sunk. Suppose she had been washing them? Yes, he might believe
that. Haul the elephant cushions back into the play room. Come on, come on. There was no time. He'd
be through the door any second. What was keeping him?

She checked her gate cams. At first she thought they had malfunctioned. She couldn't see himтАФor
anyone. Her main gate was concealed in the cleft of what looked like an enormous boulder which
Bernardo had had fabricated in Toledo, Ohio in 2037. The house panned down its length until she saw a
girl taking her shirt off at the far end of the cleft.

She looked to be twelve or maybe thirteen, but still on the shy side of puberty. She was skinny and pale
and dirty. Her hair was a brown tangle. She wasn't wearing a bra and didn't need one; her yellow panties
were decorated with blue hippos. The girl had built a smoky fire and was trying to dry her clothes over it.
She must have been caught in a rainstorm. The house never paid attention to weather but now she
checked. Twenty-two degrees Celsius, wind out of the southeast at eleven kilometers per hour, humidity
69%. A muggy evening in July. The girl reached into a camo backpack, pulled out a can of beets and
opened it.

The house studied her with a fierce intensity. Bernardo had told her that there were no other houses like
her on the mountain and he was the only person who had ever come up her side. The girl chewed with
her mouth open. She had tiny ears. Her nipples were brown as chocolate.

After a while the girl resealed the can of beets and put it away. She had eaten maybe half of it. The house
did a quick calculation and decided that she had probably consumed three hundred calories. How often
did she eat? Not often enough. The skin stretched taut against her ribs as the girl put her shirt on. Her
pants clung to her, not quite dry. She drew a ragged, old snugsack from the pack, ballooned it and then
wriggled in. It was dark now. The girl watched the fire go out for about an hour and then lay down.

It was the longest night of the house's life. She rearranged herself to her defaults and ran her diagnostics.
She vacuumed her couch and washed all her floors and defrosted a chicken. She watched the girl sleep
and replayed the files of when she had been awake. The house was so lonely and the poor little thing was
clearly distressed.

She could help the girl.

Bernardo would be mad.