"Elizabeth Moon - Serrano 3 - Winning Colors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

Winning Colors
Elizabeth Moon



Dedication
This one's for Mary Morell, who introduced me to science fiction in the ninth grade, and then insisted the
wonderful (!) stories I wrote in high school were lousy. (She was right.) And for Ellen McLean, who refused to
be my friend in the first grade, only to be a better friend later than anyone could ask. And for all the horses,
from the horse next door to the little bay mare who presently has her nose in my feed bucket, who enriched
my life with everything from (a few) broken bones to the feel of going at speed across country.



Chapter One
Twoville, Sublevel 3, on the planet Patchcock,
in the Familias Regnant
Conspirators come in two basic flavors, Ottala thought. The bland vanillas, usually wealthy, who meet in
comfortably appointed boardrooms or dining rooms, scenting the air with expensive perfumes, liqueurs, and
good food. The more complex chocolates, usually impoverished, who meet in dingy back rooms of failing
businesses or scruffy warehouses, where the musty air stinks of dangerous chemicals and unwashed bodies.
The vanillas, when they cursed, did so with a sense of risk taken, as if the expletives might pop in their
mouths like flimsy balloons and sting their tongues. The chocolates cursed without noticing, the familiar
phrases embedded in their speech like nuts in candy, lending texture. The vanillas claimed to loathe violence,
resorting to it with reluctance, under the lash of stern morality. The chocolates embraced violence and its
tools as familiar and comforting rituals. No wonder, since when the vanillas chose violence, they employed
chocolates for it.
Ottala much preferred luxury herself; she considered that a long leisurely soak in perfumed water was the
only civilized way to begin the day. She too felt the little shock of surprise when she heard the expletives
come out of her own mouth with no immediate punishment. Her skin preferred the sensuous touch of silk; her
taste buds rejoiced during elaborate dinners created by talented cooks. But she could not confine her
sensuality to the bland end of the spectrum. Vanilla was not enough. In her own mind, she considered her
taste for chocolate an expression of unusual sensitivity.
What she tasted at the moment was the sour underbite of processed protein extruded into pseudo-sausages
nested in pickled neo-cabbage. She sat on a hard bench, elbow-to-elbow with the rest of Cell 571, munching
the supper that preceded the evening's entertainment. Or so she called it; she was aware that her fellow
conspirators considered it more important than anything else they did with their lives.
Her friends would not have recognized her. Her normally bronze skin had the pallor associated with the
underbellies of cave-dwelling amphibians; her dark eyes were masked with blue contact lenses, which also
gave her red-rimmed lids, the better to fit in with the locals. She wore the same dark, ill-cut coveralls and had
the same fingertip calluses as the others; she had held a real job on the assembly lineтАФwith faked papers,
which wasn't that unusualтАФfor the past two months.
It was all a great adventure. She knew things about her family's company that she had never imagined; she
would have incomparable tales to tell when she went back topside. Meanwhile, she could eat sour
pseudo-sausage, drink cheap wine, use words her parents didn't even know, and find out for herself if the
reputation of Finnvardian men was deserved. So far she wasn't sure. . . . Enar had ranked only average on her
personal scale, but if Sikar would only look at her . . .
She finished her supper, as the others finished theirs. Odd, how the same custom held at tables high and
lowтАФeveryone tried to finish at the same time. Across the room, Sikar stood, and silence spread around him.
He was the contact from higher up, the man whose respect they all wanted. Even in the baggy dark clothing,