"Laura Resnick - Heaven's Only Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Laura)

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Heaven's Only Daughter
by Laura Resnick
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Copyright (c)1992 by Laura Resnick
First published in Whatdunits, October 1992

Fictionwise
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Science Fiction


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It was a strange case right from the start. Mrs. Polona Heaven said
that her daughter, one Kara Heaven, had been kidnapped by aliens. She hired us
to get the girl back with the stipulation that there was to be no scandal or
political embarrassment involved in the girl's retrieval. That was how she put
it: retrieval. That should have tipped me off, but I was still relatively new
to the business. The technical stuff, like tracing missing persons, verifying
identities, tailing suspects -- you can learn all of that pretty quickly. But
reading people? No, that takes years of experience.
You may wonder what a nice girl like me is doing in this sordid
business. Actually, ever since the first Interstellar Arms Reduction Treaty
was signed, a lot of perfectly respectable people (i.e., ex-military types who
sincerely believed they were honor-bound to destroy two whole planets in the
Incubus system before we learned that those poisonous molds were actually
sentient beings) have gone into private investigations. What's more, business
is booming in the private sector. Let's face it, with the galaxy opening up
and bureaucracy spearheading humankind's expansion into the Milky Way, there's
not much point in expecting the government, the police, or the civil service
to get anything done on behalf of the ordinary citizen. Sure, when the
Governor of the United African States awoke one day to find her ceremonial
tiara had been stolen, it was a big deal, and three interplanetary law
enforcement networks searched half the solar system for the culprit (in
addition to priceless gems, the tiara apparently had certain religious
significance, and witch doctors far and wide were gleefully warning that the
African union would crumble if the tiara were not successfully retrieved and
the thief suitably punished). But if an ordinary person's tiara -- or daughter
-- disappears these days, your only hope is to hire a team of private
investigators.
I actually used to be a reproductive counselor (or, more accurately, I