"Robert Reed - A Place With Shade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

my blue sky, but the color would have been dishonest."

A mosquito landed on my hand, tasting me and discovering that I wasn't a
caribou, flying off without drawing blood.

"Bleak fits my mood, Mr. Locum."

I looked at him.

And again he offered his nonsmile, making me feel, if only for an instant,
sorry
for him.

Beaty, say some artists, is the delicious stew made from your subject's flaws.

Ula Lei was a beautiful young woman.

She had a hundred hectare tent pitched beside her father's home, the place
filled with bio stocks and empty crystal wombs and computers capable of
modeling
any kind of terraforming project. She was standing beside a huge reader,
waving
and saying "Come here," with the voice people use on robots. Neither polite
nor
intimidating.

I approached, thinking that she looked slight. Almost underfed. Where I had
expected an ungraceful woman-child, I instead found a mannerly but almost
distant professional- was she embarrassed to need a tutor? Or was she unsure
how
to act with a stranger? Either way, the old man's warning about my "toy"
status
seemed overstated. Taking a frail, pretty hand, feeling the polite and
passionless single shake, I went from wariness to a mild funk, wondering if I
had failed some standard. It wounded me when she stared right through me,
asking
with a calm dry voice, "What shall we do first?"

Funk became a sense of relief, and I smiled, telling her, "Decide on our
project, and its scale."

"Warm work, and huge."

I blinked. "Your father promised us a thousand hectare tent, plus any of his
robots --"

"I want to use an old mine," she informed me.

"With a warm environment?"