"Judith Merril - Wish Upon a Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

For most of an hour, they had barely moved or talked: they just lay there together in the private
shadow, sharing what had been his alone, thinking and dreaming silently but not separately at all.
Nothing Naomi said or did ought to matter now, because things-as-they-were had given him this
special thing, a place and a significance, to share with Sarah. Never before had he told anyone about the
shadowsтАФhow he felt about them. (No one but Ab, of course, but that was different; Ab knew.) She
had seen them, naturally, most every day of her life; everyone in the ship had. The nursery-age children
spent at least an hour each day hullside, for ultra exposure and exercise as well as their basic fichem.
When they started with Standard School class-work, they were required to spend a half-hour of play-ti
me every day under the lamps. But it was the light they came for; the shadows belonged to Sheik.
When he was just old enough to be allowed to go about alone, he started coming down hullside
every chance he had; the shadows drew him. Later, the plants became important, too, and now he knew
that they would be his work all his life. That was good in itself, but better because the shadows were part
of the plants.
Nowhere else in the whole ship was there anything like it. Once in a while, the floorlight or one of the
walls in the regular living and work rooms would go out of whack, and for a brief time the diffusion would
be distorted and patches of dark-and-bright showed when people moved. But only here, where the thick
rootpack lined the whole inner shell of the ship's hull, where then were only struts instead of walls, and
the great ultra lamps glared day and night overhead, only here were there real shadows, under the plants,
stationary, permanent, and shaped.
The ultras were never dimmed. They shone, Sheik thought, with the same brilliant fixity of time and
purpose as the pinpointed stars on the black satin of the lounge viewplate. And in the center of this same
clump of shrubbery where he lay now there was a hollow spot where some of the oldest, tallest plants
grew so thick no light could penetrate, where it was dark, black, almost as black as the space between
the stars: the way, he thought, a planet's night must be.
And this spot, where he had taken Sarah, wasтАФdepending where you held your headтАФa moonlit
planet night, a "twilight," "morning," or "afternoon" . . . all words in books, until they took on meaning here
where the leaves and lights produced an infinitude of ever-changing shades and combinations of black,
gray, green, brown, and gold.
He had never told anyone how he thought about that. Not Abdur; not even Sarah, yet. But if she
asked him to take her here again, he thought, he could tell her; she would really understand.
He sat up sharply, the faint rustling sound like an answer to a prayer. Sarah?
Two plant stalks parted cautiously and a small, round, brown face stared into his own.
"What are you doing down here now?" Sheik demanded. How had the fool kid found him here?
"I told 'm I'd find you," Hari said triumphantly. "I told 'm I could. You better hurry. Ab's mad at you.
He has to work onna mew-tay-shuns," the small boy said the new word carefully, "an' you're supposed
to be our teacher this time."
Sheik scrambled to his feet. Nursery class here already? That late? He'd spent half the afternoon
doing nothing, dreaming . . . Ab must be mad, all right!
"You forgot about us," Hari said.
He hadn't forgotten; he had just forgotten time. "Come on, shrimpy," he told Harendra gruffly. "Better
hop on if you want to get back quick." He squatted and Hari climbed on his shouldersтАФa rare and
special treat; it would make up for his seeming to forget. He started for Abdur's workroom at a trot.
Harendra was three years old now, almost four, but he was Yoshikazu's favorite in the nursery still.
He had been Sheik's first full-charge baby; sometimes he didn't seem too sure himself which one was his
father, Abdur or Sheik. Certainly he didn't care; he loved them both with the same fierce intensity. And it
upset him if Ab was angry with the Sheik.
Abdur had been spending all his time the past few days struggling to save a planting of mutant
seedlings newly developed in the Bichem lab. It was a high-protein lentil with a new flavor, but some
mysterious lack in root-pack nourishmentтАФthe kind of thing that showed up only in actual growth
conditionsтАФmade it essential to nurse each plant with extra care while the lab techs tried to find the