"Elizabeth Moon - Planet Pirates 01 - The Death of Sleep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

The first few days she spent in the tiny, plain-walled cubicle which doubled as her sleeping quarters and
office were a trifle lonely. Lunzie had too many hours to think of her daughter Fiona. Fiona, fourteen,
lovely and precocious in Lunzie's unbiased opinion, had been left behind in the care of a friend who was
the chief medical officer on the newly colonized planet of Tau Ceti. The settlement was surprisingly
comfortable for one so recently established. It had a good climate, a biosphere reasonably friendly
toward humankind, marked seasons, and plenty of arable land that allowed both Earth-type and hybrid
seeds to prosper. Lunzie hoped to settle down there herself when she finished her tour of duty on the
Platform, but she wasn't independently wealthy. Even a commodity as precious as medical expertise
wasn't sufficient to buy into the Tau Ceti association. She needed to earn a stake, and there was little call
on an atmosphere-and-gravity world for her to practice her specialty of psychological space-incurred
trauma. There was no help for it: she was compelled to go off-planet to earn money. To her great
dismay, all of the posts which were best suited to her profession and experience - and paid the most -
were on isolated facilities. She would not be able to take Fiona with her. After much negotiation, Lunzie
signed on with Descartes for a stint on a remote mining platform.



Fiona had been angry that she couldn't accompany her mother to the Descartes Platform, and had
refused to accept the fact. In the last days before Lunzie's departure, Fiona had avoided speaking to her,
and stubbornly unpacked Lunzie's two five-kilo duffels as often as her mother filled them up. It was an
adolescent prank, but one that showed Lunzie how hurt Fiona felt to be abandoned. Since she was born,
they had never been apart more than a day or so. Lunzie herself was aching at the impending separation,
but she understood, as Fiona would not, the economic necessity that caused her to take a medical berth
so far away and leave Fiona behind.



Their spacefare to Tau Ceti had been paid on speculation by the science council, who were testing the
viability of a clone breeding center on the newly colonized planet. Lunzie had been approached by the
ethics council to join them, their interest stemming from her involvement as the student advisor on a
similar panel during her days in medical school which had resulted in an experimental colony. Surprisingly,
the data on that earlier effort was unavailable even to the participants on the panel. Her former
term-husband Sion had also given her his recommendation. He was becoming very well known and
respected in genetic studies, mainly involved in working on controlling the heavyworld human mutations.
 There were four or five meetings of the ethics council, which quickly determined that even so altruistic a
project as fostering a survival-oriented genome was self-defeating in just a few generations, and no
further action was taken. Lunzie was out of work in a colony that didn't need her. Because of the
classified nature of the study, she was unable even to explain to her daughter why she wasn't employed in
the job which they had traveled to Tau Ceti to take.



After the fifth or sixth time she had to repack her case, Lunzie knew by heart the few possessions she
was taking with her, and locked her luggage up in the poisons cabinet in the Tau Ceti medical center to
keep Fiona away from it.