"R. Garcia Y Robertson - Oxygen Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

"Sure." Tammy nonchalantly watched his reaction, but by now, Derek was enough of a negotiator not to
show disappointment. "Back in Portland," she added, making them both laugh. Oregon was so far off
that laser-mail took four hundred years to get a reply. He left before she could ask if he had a girlfriend.

All he told Mia was that he had hired Tammy. His Greenie girlfriend was pleased, saying her good-bye to
him on the temple porch of their bonsai garden apartment, with wind chimes tinkling overhead. "Be
careful," Mia pleaded, "I'm not done with you. And take care of Tammy too."

"Tammy?" He was surprised by her concern for Pender's former aide.

"Yes. Tammy will be alone among men and weapons. She will need a good man to watch over her, and
you are the best I know." Mia gave him another kiss, then let him go.

Billions of years ago, when Ares system was still forming, a Rhode Island-sized rock had slammed into
Harmonia's northern hemisphere, carving out the Hyperborian Depression, sub-polar lowlands a
thousand klicks across. Ringed by dry ragged, highlands, the lowlands were slowly filling with rain water
that would one day submerge everything but the central volcanic peak thrust high up into the thin air.
Glass remnants of Gekko towns shone amid silent green swamps and marshes inhabited by herds of
hippos who were busily converting the greenery into fish food and fertilizer. Humans had brought all sorts
of useful animals with them to fill out Harmonia's slowly emerging ecology, though Greenies would now
tailor the world to their tastes, and Mia would be the one coming down to catalogue the hippo herds.

But first the swamps must be made safe for Greenies. That was for Leo and Derek to do, and now
Tammy. Riding down on the shuttle, Derek sat beside his new teammate, excitedly listening to stories
from Earth. So much time, so many wonders. How strange that most of human existence had been
confined to that one tiny planet. He asked Tammy, "Why did you leave?"

"There are forty billion people in the solar system, most of them on Earth," Tammy explained. "Crowds
like that can be lonely. I wanted to live on a world like Earth was when there were not so many of us."

And now they were going down to root the last human remnants out of Harmonia. Tammy sighed, saying,
"Weird thing is, I still get laser-mail from my sister Mary, who must be two hundred years older than me
by now. It was all sent when Mary was in her twenties, birth announcements, Christmas greetings, that
sort of thingтАФnothing very personal. Sometimes I miss Portland, but there isn't a lot you can do with a
doctorate in Humanities, except leave the planet."

"You have a doctorate in Humanism?" Derek was shocked to discover they gave degrees in intolerance
and racial superiority.

His surprise amused Tammy. "Humanism and the Humanities are totally different. My specialty was Dead
LanguagesтАФLatin, Sumerian, Japanese, that sort of thing."

Fascinated, Derek asked, "So, do you speak English?"

Tammy smiled. "All my life."
"Say something in English," he suggested. Many of the settler holdouts came from North America, and
English would be a good way of proving she was not a Greenie.

Tammy said something short and unintelligible, but her quaint accent made it sound fetching, even
romantic. Derek asked, "What does that mean?"