"Pohl, Frederik - The Sweet, Sad Queen Of The Grazing Isles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

It was his young wife, the lady Ella. She loved him. So I worked overtime one
night, and displayed his file, and changed a few dates, sweating with fear. He
had his thirty days. And the backer did, at the last minute, come through with
the money to finish the boat, and so James William Mackenzie became the
Commodore.
He was a son of a bitch, Commodore Mackenzie, but he had style. Fifty shares of
stock I got and a title: Executive Assistant to the Fleet Captain. Very grand.
Even if the fleet was still only a single vessel. But even one oaty-boat is a
huge and costly machine, two hundred thousand metric tons of hull and works,
towing twenty kilometers of tubes and pumps, with a deck the size of a township.
The Commodore did something you won't believe with that deck, or at least with
the part forward of the bridge. He planted it. He pumped aboard half a million
cubic meters of San Francisco Bay bottom muck while the boat was still at the
builder's dock. The water ran off through the scuppers, and the soil remained.
He sailed it up toward Tacoma for the deep-water fitting and steamed slowly
around the wettest, stormiest part of the Pacific Coast until the rain had
rinsed it clean. Seeds and slips and bulbs and saplings came aboard, and by the
time we were on our first cruise there was grass there, and gardens, and the
beginnings of a grove. For his dear lady Ella hated the sea. So Owner's Quarters
were an apartment below deck and a terrace above, and if you looked only forward
you could think you were in some fine manor house with the weather always balmy
and the lawn as steady as any on Earth. The weather was always fine because
oaty-boats are never in bad weather. That is why they are boats, instead of
drilling platforms or moored barges, so that they can seek out the places where
sea and air are best to do their work.
And for four years they were happy, and I was happy, and the great boat steamed
slowly through the fruitful patches of the southern ocean, sucking up the cold
and pitting it against the warm, and, oh, how the money rolled in! And we were
happiest of all in the fourth year, when Ella was pregnant. She was a tiny,
frail woman, all spirit and no stamina, and there were times when in even the
calmest seas she seemed unwell. Yet as a pregnant woman she bloomed, prettier
than ever and glowing with the child inside. The baby was born, even prettier
than her mother. It was in the month of May, and so they called her May, and
then the happiness stopped because Ella died. It was not childbirth alone-she
had the best of doctors, flown in from Sydney and San Francisco. It was cancer.
She had known she had it, and kept it secret, and wouldn't let them cut it away
because it would have cut away the unborn child as well. Childbirth merely
finished her off.
It was her wish to be buried on land. The Commodore walked dry-eyed through the
crew quarters and crooked a finger at an oiler's mate named Elsie Van Dorn. A
large, plain woman, but a kind one. And when he came back from the funeral, he
took all the Fleet stock that was in Ella's name and put it into baby May's, and
gave me a new job. "Van Dorn will be May's nursemaid, he said, "but you'll be
her godfather. That was a joke, I think, because we had been told that money was
his god. "You're Managing Director of the May Mackenzie Trust, and if you do
anything wrong with it I'll kill you. Even if I die for it. Even if I die first,
for I'll leave a little sum of money and some orders, and someone will be
watching who has a gun. He still owed me for the favor I had done him, you see,
but he remembered what it was.
And for seven years baby May grew, and wasn't a baby any more.