"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

Five

FOR THE
GOOD ARE
ALWAYS
THE MERRY
Small, my god it is small, my god it is smallтАж That was all I could think about as I sat down to dinner,
all I had thought about all afternoon. Wallich had met with me, as promised, and it was all I could do to
keep from telling him I quit, I couldn't do this, he would have to find somebody else. Rosenblum? Ancell?
Oh, God, not Ancell. The thought of him smearing his boastful opinions all over the story, and then
strutting and crowing at me about it for the rest of his life and mine тАж And they would get Ancell, too.
Somehow, I knew they would. And so I held firm.

But it was small; the ship's interior was like a bathroom with seven shower stalls and a streetcar cockpit
wedged incongruously at one end, a utility closet wedged in at the other. I'd seen the plans, thought I was
prepared, but this was crazy. I was crazy.
Large and crowded, the cafeteria nonetheless had a little round table reserved for Louis Pasteur's crew,
right beside the single large window overlooking the shipyards. A hell of a view, really; four
half-completed ships were visible below, and two whole ones presumably drydocked for repairs. Louis
Pasteur herself was not among them, but together they represented three sizes, four overall designs, six
color schemes, and fully a quarter of Galileo's shipping tonnage. The shop floor was enormous, probably
a full hectare sprawling some twenty meters below us, but still I felt claustrophobic.

On my zee-spec, images threatened to crowd out the real world altogether: paired data gene sequences
scrolling upward in tandem, the duplicate portions flashing like alarm lights; the Io Sengen and
Innensburg mycora, pulsing with false-color image enhancements and shifting annotations from the
library tutorial; a map of the solar system, with Louis Pasteur's course charted out as a dotted white line
swinging close by Mars, kissing the orbit of Earth, and then finally rising back toward the Immunity,
toward the cold and dark of the upper solar system.

And of course, I had a media window cycling slowly and methodically through my own net channels as
well. A reminder to myself: This is where you are going, and why. danger, a mystery, a brass ring to
be seized. Just stay cool and you'll be a part of it, be right there as it unfolds. Correspondent,
berichter, official historian to the Immunity. Nine months of hell and you'll have it all.

Beside me, Tosca Lehne snorted and banged a cup on the table. "Hey, Strasheim, she's talking to you."

"What?" I looked up, saw that Jenna Davenroy had been speaking to me from across the table. "I'm
sorry, I didn't catch that."

Shaking loose a few stands of unruly, tin-colored hair, Davenroy rolled her eyes and stabbed pale fingers
at the air. "I said, what are you reading? Pardon my nosiness, but what we read at the dinner table says
an awful lot about us as people."

"Yeah," Tug Jinacio chipped in, "especially what we read when people are trying to meet us. Come on,
give with it. Geek it over."

"It's nothing," I assured them. "Just a little homework."