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

"Ronnie, this isn't an age in which anyone gives much for romantic love. If it happens that you fall for
someone of the right class, at the right time, then fine. But most people don't. Petris and I served on the
same ships and never allowed ourselves to notice that we loved each other: it would have been bad for the
ship. Grown-ups have values outside their own skins."
"And you're saying I'm not a grown-up yet?"
"No. You areтАФyou've grown a lot in the time I've known you, and frankly you've surprised me. But this last
lingering bit of adolescence is hanging on, right where it usually does."
He gave a rueful laugh. "I suppose you think I'm silly."
"Not at all. Nor do I think your situation with Raffa will last forever, especially not if you set out to change it."
"How?"
Heris was tempted to say, You're a grown-up; you figure it out, but she had never seen Ronnie as a master of
strategy. Brave, yes. Bright enough in limited circumstances, yes. But not a strategist. "Two things. You
either need to change the overall situation so that your parents' quarrel with your aunt no longer imperils your
inheritance and your parents' political and economic allies, or you need to change your situation in relation to
your parents. Ideally, both."
"Both! That's impossible." Ronnie began to stride around the small office, exactly like a nervous colt in a
small box stall. Heris expected him to bump his nose into a wall and rear at any moment. "I can't make Aunt
Cecelia change her mind; nobody's ever made Aunt Cecelia change her mind. And I can't make my parents
be someone else. Not unless I repudiate them and change my name or something. How will disinheriting
myself help convince Raffa?"
Just as she'd thought, no strategic sense at all. "Ronnie, look at what you've told me you want. You want to
marry Raffa, but I assume this means you also want a long, happy, profitable life and you don't want to harm
either her family or yours."
"Well . . . yes."
"You also want the best for your Aunt Cecelia, don't you?"
"Yes, but I can't do all that at once."
"Not if you don't look at it. You know my background; well, a consistent mistake I've seen commanders make
is defining the mission too narrowly. Did you ever study the Patchcock Incursion in the Royals?"
"Uh . . . yes. It got kind of complicated. . . ."
"It was complicated from the beginning, and an oversimplified mission statement made it worse. Military
commanders like to see neat, tidy problems . . . well, I suppose everyone does. The dog is howling: shoot
the dog. The contract colonists are rioting: shoot the colonists. The contract corporation reneged on its
contract to provide medical services: shoot the corporation CEO. The Council told Fleet Command they
wanted no more rioting on Patchcock. They didn't tell Fleet Command that a two-month interruption in
shipments of ore would bankrupt Gleisco Metals, with cascading effects through its parent corporation into
half a dozen Chairholders. They didn't tell Fleet that a two-month interruption in ore shipments would mean
cutting off the food supply not only to Patchcock but also to Derrien and Slidell. They didn't tell Fleet that
Gleisco Metals had refused to provide services agreed on, and then altered the contracts to reflect that. So
Fleet went in to sit on some malcontents, and ended up responsible for the deaths by starvation of several
thousand people, the deaths by direct action of thousands more, andтАФif you care to look at it that way,
which the then king did, the suicides of eighteen members of high-ranking families, including five of the six
Chairholders most closely connected to Gleisco. The other one was murdered by his own sister."
"I didn't know all that," Ronnie said. He looked very uncomfortable. "They told us about it as an example of a
commander losing control of troops in a battlefield situation."
"Hushed it up," Heris said. "I thought they might have done it, even after the trials at the time." She grinned,
without humor. Her family had been involved in that one, too. "My point is that if you want something to
happen, you must specify that something with great care and as much completeness as possible. Then, and
only then, can you devise a strategy to accomplish what you really wantтАФall of itтАФand not some little bit that
turns out to be meaningless when everything else falls apart."
He didn't answer at once, a good sign. When the silence had become uncomfortably long (for Heris had