"Vonda N. McIntyre - Little Faces" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

The wound beneath her navel had healed, leaving a pale white scar. Beneath her skin, the sperm packet
Zorargul emitted as its last living action made a jagged capsule, invisible, but perceptible to her fingers
and vaguely painful to her nerves. She had to decide whether to use it, or to finish encapsulating it and
expel it in turn.

Without being asked, the ship absorbed the shorn ends of her hair. She and the ship had been born
together; despite the mysteries each species kept from the other, each knew the other's habits. It
produced a length of ship silk formed into comfortable and neutral garments: loose pants with a filmy lace
panel to obscure the companions, a sleeveless shirt with a similar lace panel. She wore clothes that
allowed the companions some view of the world, for they could be troublesome when bored. She left the
silk its natural soft beige, for the horizontal stripes of her hair gave plenty of drama. She twisted her hair
into a thick rope to keep it from tangling as she dressed, then let it loose again. It lay heavy on her neck
and shoulders.

I may reconsider this haircut, she thought. But not till after the launch. I can be formal for that long, at
least.

Messages flowed in from the other ships. It pleased her that so many had accepted her invitation. Still she
did not reply, even to welcome them. Her ship looked out a long distance, but no other craft
approached. The party was complete.

Yalnis closed her eyes to inspect her ship's status and records. The ship ran a slight fever, reflecting its
increasing metabolism. Its flank, smooth before her sleep, now bulged. The daughter ship lay in its birth
pouch, shiny-skinned and adorned with a pattern of small knots. The knots would sink into the new ship's
skin, giving it the potential of openings, connections, ports, antennae, undifferentiated tissue for
experiment and play.

"It's beautiful," she whispered to the ship.

"True."

The companions squeaked with hunger, though they had spent the last thousand years dozing and feeding
without any exertion. They were fat and sleek. They were always hungry, or always greedy, rising for a
treat or a snack, though they connected directly to her bloodstream as well as to her nerves and could
draw their sustenance from her without ever opening their little mouths or exposing their sharp little teeth.

But Yalnis had been attached to the ship's nutrients for just as long, and she too was ravenous.

She left the living room and descended to the garden. The light was different, brighter and warmer. The
filter her ship used to convey light to the garden mimicked a blanket of atmosphere.

She arrived at garden's dawn. Birds chirped and sang in the surrounding trees, and a covey of quail
foraged along borders and edges. Several rabbits, nibbling grass in the pasture, raised their heads when
she walked in, then, unafraid, went back to grazing. They had not seen a person for thousands of their
generations.

The garden smelled different from the rest of the ship, the way she believed the surface of a planet might
smell. She liked it, but it frightened her, too, for it held living organisms she would never see. The health
of the garden demanded flotillas of bacteria, armies of worms, swarms of bugs. She thought it might be
safer to grow everything in hydroponic tanks, as had been the fashion last time she paid attention, but she