"James Patrick Kelly - Think Like a Dinosaur (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

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Think Like A Dinosaur
by James Patrick Kelly
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Copyright (c)1995 James Patrick Kelly
First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 1995

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction
Hugo Award Winner

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KAMALA SHASTRI came back to this world as she had left it -- naked. She
tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station's delicate
gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased
her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She
was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters
long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps
some Gendian's idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting
strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock
her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had
learned to think like an alien.
"Welcome back." The float's whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it
down the hallway.
She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she
would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the
assembler; it's because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was
on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here
in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life's great adventure was over.
"Matthew?" she said.
"Michael." I couldn't help but be pleased that that she remembered me.
After all, she had changed my life.
****
I've guided maybe three hundred migrations -- comings and goings -- since I
first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri's is the only quantum
scan I've ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a
trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her -- at
least, as she was three years ago -- than I know about myself. When the dinos
sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81
million per mm^3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her