"Nancy Kress - Crossfire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Federation passed stiffer penalties for illegal genemods. The war in West Africa is worse. The
rebellion in China has escalated. Another earthquake along the Pacific Rim. Coffee crop failure in
Colombia. The Genetic Modification Institute has announced another drug to combat melanomas. You
can get all the details printed on a flimsy right after lunch."
"I will do that, also," Faisal said in his impeccable, sexily accented English. Gail, of course,
was immune to the accent, but she suspected Ingrid wasn't.
Transmissions came twice a month from Earth by quee, Quantum Entanglement Energy link. By now the
Ariel, moving at 1.25 gees, had reached some sizable percentage of cтАФGail was no scientist. Quee
was instantaneous, if costly. It was the Ariel's only tie to home; every week left farther behind
not only in space but, thanks to the relativistic speeds the ship would attain before it began
deceleration, in time as well. When the colonists disembarked on Greentrees, they would have spent
six years and seven months aboard ship. On Earth, nearly seventy years would have passed. Earth
would be an unimaginably different place, and most loved ones long since become dust. Which was,
of course, why most colonists brought their loved ones with them, traveling in groups. Gail's
entire extended family, 203 people, lay asleep belowdecks.
"Well," Ingrid said peevishly, "I wish you'd paid for weekly news instead of just twice monthly.
It couldn't have cost that much moreтАФwe're already paying for that second quee link, anyway.
What's for lunch? Not fish again?"
"I believe it has a different sauce today," William Shipley said. "Doesn't it smell good!"
Shipley's cheerful tact irritated Gail almost as much as Ingrid's pettishness. Slow down, Gail
told herself. Keep control. We expected this.
Two years gone, four plus to go. Already everyone who had paid to stay awake was tired of the
food, tired of the available entertainments, tired of the exercise room, tired of each other.
Three of the twenty had already elected to be put into cold sleep for the rest of the voyage: Gail
and Jake had a bet on how much longer the rest would last. Cold-sleep boxes awaited each of them.
Only Captain Scherer and his crew of six were really necessary before the interstellar voyage
ended, and the captain, unlike the civilians, had the military appreciation for keeping his
sailors fully occupied as a defense against boredom, depression, and hostility.
"Where's Jake?" Shipley asked, helping himself to fish and rice that until ten minutes ago had
been frozen solid. "He wasn't at breakfast, either."
"He's with the other meal shift," Gail said. The wardroom could seat only ten when the table was
lowered from the wall; meals had been planned in two shifts. She and Jake ate with each shift,
sometimes separately, sometimes together to compare notes. It was important to track everyone's
mental stability. The only significant selection procedure for these colonists had been their
money. "What did everyone do this morning?"
Todd Johnson, Ingrid's mild and dominated husband, said pleasantly, "We analyzed once again the
bacteria genomes from Greentrees' soil samples."
"Not that we haven't been over them twenty times already," Ingrid said.
"We'll have new data soon, honey, from Greentrees."
"Oh, is another quee transmission due from the planetary probe?" William Shipley asked with
interest. "May I see the data?"
"Certainly," Todd said, while Ingrid pursed her lips in professional territoriality.
Shipley, the New Quaker representative ("We have no leaders"), was interested in everything. Gail
could not have defined her exact expectations of a New Quaker, but Shipley wasn't it. The New
Quakers were supposed to be a return to austere First Principles, a rejection of the "worldliness"
that had crept into the religion since its plain and humble beginnings in the seventeenth century.
Shipley, like his 1902 sleeping fellows, dressed in unadorned gray coverall with no jewelry or


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