"03.Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

lately the hideaway brought her as much sadness as joy.
She'd been at the academy for eight years now, learning
all she could of machines. A prodigy when she arrived,
Jhoira was now a formidable artificer. She was also a woman,
or at eighteen nearly so, and was weary of the school and
the kids, of brimstone and machine oil. She was sick to
death of artifice and illusion and wanted something real-
someone real.
Jhoira closed her eyes, drawing a deep breath of salty
air into her lungs. Her soul mate would be tall and bronze-
skinned, like the young Ghitu tribesmen back home-keen-eyed
and strong. He would be smart, yes, but not like Teferi and
the other boys who tried to get Jhoira's attention through
juvenile antics and unsubtle innuendoes. He would be a man,
and he would be mysterious. That was most important of all.
She could not be in love with a man unless, at the core of
his being, there was mystery.
She opened her eyes and shifted her weight, one sandal
sending up a puff of dust. "I'm a fool. There's not a man
like that in the world." Even if there were, she'd never get
to meet him, not while she was stuck on this blasted island.

* * * * *

Standing, the silver man awoke. He had moved before, had
walked and spoken before. He had occupied this enormous body
of metal, peered out of its silvery eyes, and lifted things
in its massive hands. Before it had been always as if in a
dream. Now he was awake. Now he was alive.
The laboratory around him was bright and clean. Master
Malzra liked it clean-clean but cluttered. One wall held
hundreds of sketches and refinements of sketches, some in
ink, some in lead, some in chalk. Another bristled with
specialized implements- metal lathes, beam saws, injection
molds, presses, rollers, bellows, drills. A third wall bore
racks of cogs and struts and other mechanical castings. A
fourth held ranks of assembled mechanisms. A fifth-very few
of the school's rooms were square-allowed egress into the
room. In the center of the space, a great black forge rose.
Its smokestack climbed up and away through the dome above. A
second-floor gallery ringed the fringes of the room. Up in
those balconies even now, young eyes peered down on the
result of Master Malzra's latest experiment. They peered
down on the silver man.
The silver man peered back. He felt frightened, awkward,
shy. He wondered what they thought about him-wondered and
cared in a way he never had before. Everything was like
that. He had seen this laboratory many times before, but he
never would have used terms like clean and cluttered and
bright to describe it or the man who had created it. Now the