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

waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential
spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine and premature ejaculation,
blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the
wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.
"Tell me a secret," I said.
"What?"
"A secret, you know, something no one else knows."
She stared as if I'd just fallen off Mars.
"Look, in a little while you're going some place that's what ... three
hundred and ten light years away? You're scheduled to stay for three years. By
the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous and elsewhere; we'll
probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise
not to tell."
She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. "This is
another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still
have not decided whether to send me."
"Oh no, in a couple of hours you'll be cracking nuts with ferrets in
some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking."
"You are crazy."
"Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It's from the
Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love
to chat is all. Tell you what, I'll go first. If my secret isn't juicy enough,
you don't have tell me anything."
Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that
whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn't being swallowed by
the big blue marble.
"I was brought up Catholic," I said, settling onto a chair in front of
her. "I'm not anymore, but that's not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary,
Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old
priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught
physics, which I got a D in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in
his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble
pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.
"One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama
Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama
Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said,
she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should've lifted her license
back in the '50's. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.
"Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I
did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way
their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than
sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe
you'd have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it
happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on
the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying
to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke
about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my
senior year with an in-school suspension."
Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the
holders built into the table.