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

"How do you get up?"
 "There's a sloping section on the other side. I can walk up." She smiled. "I suppose you have a more
technical approach."
I took out one of the spikes and showed it to her. She laughed.
"So how are your little shaggy friends?"
"Good," she said. "I'm getting more and more impressed with them."
"Oh?"
"There's more to them than I thought," she said. "They have something like a religion."
I nodded, but I wasn't really hearing what she was saying. I was trying to think of what I could say that
would bring her back to me. Everything I thought of sounded trite and abrupt.
"Or maybe not exactly a religion," she went on. "It's nothing systematic, nothing very abstract. But they
have a sense of the sacred. It's fascinating."
I nodded.
"And there seem to be two distinct groups of Shies in the area where I'm camped. There are some
surprising differences between them. For example, my Shies, the ones I talk to, don't have any trouble
with lightning dogs. The dogs ignore them, just like they ignore us. The other day I saw a lightning dog
jump over one of the Shies I talk to in order to chase a Shy from the other group."
"Interesting," I said. We all wore the same blue work togs on Veloz, colonial issue. They weren't
exactly carefully tailored, but Joanna made hers look pretty good.
"And the other Shies won't talk. They won't get close to me. I can't help feeling sometimes that I'm
seeing two different species. Ferals and talkers. Animals in one group, and in the other... In the other,
people. I get the strangest feeling when I talk to some of my Shies, that they have submerged intelligence,
powers of thought that are something like ours, only sleeping. And sometimes they say the strangest
things to me, like they're trying to tell me something very elaborate with the small vocabulary they've
learned."
"Interesting," I said again. And that was all I said. A hundred days ago, on the ship, we had been
intimate, day after ship's day, and now my tongue was tied.
"How are you, David? How's your own investigation coming?"
"Oh," I said, thinking. You're blowing this, David. "It's fine. Nothing spectacular. Nothing
unexpected."
"Something I like about the Shies," she said, "is that a lot of what I encounter is unexpected. I'm really
having a lot of fun."
"Learning anything useful?" Right after I said it, I realized how it sounded.
She turned away, and her shoulders tensed. "Not everything of value turns a profit."
"That's not what I meant," I said, but now that I had started this, it was like something that I couldn't
stop. "I've just been thinking a lot lately in terms of whether the colony is going to succeed or not. My
surveys haven't shown any special mineral wealth. I'm worried. It's been on my mind."
"Yes," she said. "It would be. We're in this strange and beautiful place, and all you think about is
turning a profit."
"That's not all I think about," I said. "I'm here, right? You think I climbed up here to find a way to
make money?"
She turned toward me, and her face lost some of its tension, but what she said was, "I don't know."
"Jo, I'm here to make a new start, to find a new way to live." I stepped closer and put an arm on her
shoulder. "I want to make enough money to earn the right to stay here. And then I want to leave all of
that behind. I want life here to be different."
She turned around, and I stood behind her, looking over the tops of the trees. Her hair smelled like
rain. Finally she said, "Be getting dark soon." And she walked away toward the far end of the
domewood without looking back.
That was the last I saw of her until after my crew made the strike in rare metals.
It all happened so quickly. We had been getting computer reports day after day with numbing