"Nancy Kress - Steamship Soldier on the Information Front" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

information-front warriors, and not really just homeless people?"
Allan considered. That did sound serious. "Did you ask him if he's feeling that you and I
travel too much? That we should make an effort to be all together more often as a family?" He
and Cathy had worried this before.
"Yes. But he said no, that wasn't it at all, his friends' parents were just the same. So I
asked him what was it, and he only said, 'When it's steamship time, it's steamship time,' and
sank into one of those motionless trances of his. Allan, I couldn't get him to even answer me
for half an hour, no matter what I did. It's like he was someplace else, sitting right there in
front of me!"
Allan gazed out the window. Far below, the New York traffic sounds hummed dimly,
reassuringly. Allan said slowly, "I got the names of two good child psychologists, one in Denver
and one in San Francisco."
"Well, that won't do a lot of good, since we're not going to be in Oakland after a few more
weeks. We're all leasing in Kansas City for the Shephard trial. Can't you take the trouble to
memorize our schedule?"
After a minute she added, "I'm sorry."
"It's all right," Allan said. "I know you're worried about Charlie, too. Listen, I'll find a
psychologist in ... " he blanked for a moment -- "Kansas City."
"Okay." Cathy smiled wanly, then clung to him. He could feel the tension in her bare back.
Charlie had always been such an easy kid. Suzette had been the temperamental one.
That's why they were concerned, Allan told himself; it was all relative. Still, for Charlie to just
sit and go into a trance where he didn't even answer people ... that couldn't be normal, could
it? To be so cut off?
Why, he wouldn't even be tuned into the Net. Anything could develop, and Charlie wouldn't
even know it!
Allan held his wife tighter. "I'll re-route to see him tomorrow."


Re-routing wasn't easy. Neither Jon nor Patti were pleased. Jon had to go himself to check
out bone-marrow scanning in Raleigh. The director of a firm making low-cost orbiting solar
panels in Dallas wouldn't be available for another two weeks if Allan missed that appointment,
because the director would be in Tokyo. Videoconferencing, the director said sniffily, was not
an acceptable substitute. Allan told Patti to tell the director to go to hell. He got a flight to
the new apartment in Kansas City.
But then Paul Sanderson called from Novation. Skaka Gupta must again be somewhere else.
"You said ... I mean, you seemed to indicate last time you were here, Allan ... uh, Mr. Haller
... that if something noteworthy happened with the bots you wanted to see it right away, so
-- "
"And something has? Unfortunately, the timing couldn't be worse. Can you describe the
development to me?"
"Oh, sure," Sanderson said, with such relief in his voice that Allan decided he better go to
Novation himself after all. The data smelled important. If he took a flight almost immediately to
Boston, even flying standby if he had to ... shit, he hated flying standby, if only developments
in transferring people could keep up with innovations in transferring data! -- if he flew
standby, and then could book a flight getting him to the Kansas City lease by at least
midnight ...
"Never mind explaining. I'll be there this afternoon."
"Okay," Sanderson said unhappily. "We'll be expecting you."
We. Him and the robots? Did Sanderson identify with them that much? Maybe; engineer
types never seemed to have any real life. Just endless tinkering with software, in the same