"Bruce Holland Rogers - Big Far Now" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Not everyone followed such obvious paths to profitability. We were all free to investigate whatever we
wanted to, since a good business idea could come from anywhere. So Joanna Carpaccio, one of our
psychologists, went into the forest to study the Shies.
Now, Joanna and I were friends. A little more than friends, in fact. We had shared quarters during the
yearlong hyperspace jump from home, taking from one another the sort of consolation that only such
sleeping arrangements can make possible. It was sort of a custom of deep-space travel. And then on
landing, according to custom, we dissolved the arrangement. Actually, we could have broken with
customs and stayed together, some couples did. But Joanna thought that we weren't quite right for each
other.
"You're so hard-nosed, David," she told me. "I think in softer edges, more expansively, more
speculatively. We just don't see things in the same way. You're a little like Meeker."
That last remark would have sounded like a compliment to me if I hadn't known what Joanna thought
of our governor. Meeker was a can-do man, my type of guy. In her own words, Joanna thought Meeker
was "shallow and manipulative."
We'd been good traveling companions, she said, but the colony was for the rest of our lives, and we
didn't click in that way. So, to save face, I agreed in a hard-nosed, mature-sounding way, and we parted
company.
Then I didn't sleep well for weeks. I paired, from time to time, with Susan Suhl or Ofra Shioshita, but I
kept thinking of Joanna, of her hair that was black as the space between the stars, and was so very cool
and soft between my fingers. When I was with Susan or Ofra or one of the others, part of me was
someplace else, someplace with Joanna.
So, as I said, Joanna went into the forest to study the Shies, though I suspected she went more
because she liked the Shies than because she imagined that we could make profitable use of them.
At any rate, I considered the Shies to be pretty useless, and almost everyone shared my view. Once
or twice, someone or other had thought about catching a Shy as a pet. On the surface of it, it wasn't a
bad idea. Shies are cute, big-eyed, roundheaded little things. Looking at one once, I thought of an
illustration of puppies and kittens and human babies in my college psychology microtext. We tend to think
of roundheaded things, like baby animals, as adorable. It's an innate response. A shaggy little Shy triggers
that same reflex, and Shies were also appealing because of their habit of mimicking speech. Call to one a
few times, and it would call back to you, like a parrot. They might indeed make good pets. But try and
catch one. Our stun-dart drugs either didn't work at all or else killed them, and you sure couldn't get
close enough to one to catch it by hand.
Lightning dogs, on the other hand, didn't have much trouble at all with catching Shies. Hunting in
tree-climbing packs, the "dogs" were adept at cornering their agile prey and closing on them in a circle of
powerful jaws. Shies put up quite a racket when they were surrounded, chattering and howling, but it
never did them any good from what I had seen.
The lightning dogs worried us when we first saw them hunting. Like Shies, they often moved faster
than the eye could follow, and almost all of us had bad memories of real dog packs in the crumbling cities
of Earth. But the lightning dogs seemed hardly to notice us. We decided that in such a uniform
environment, they already knew what prey looked like. We didn't fit the menu, so they ignored us.
So Joanna took to the forest to study the Shies, and I didn't see her much. I was busy sampling and
setting up my remote mineral survey. From time to time, though, she would come back to camp with
stories about how she had the Shies eating towerfruit out of her hands, and I'd invite her to my tent and
ask her questions about the Shies without really listening to her answers, but thinking instead of new
questions, anything to keep her talking to me. I think I convinced her that I thought the Shies were
fascinating.
And then, for a little while, they were fascinating. Joanna came back with audio samples of Shies
talking. Talking.
It created a bit of a stir for all of us. The most intelligent animals encountered so far in human space
travel were merely what we had imagined Shies were, namely, about as smart as dogs. But the Shies in