"Mary Rosenblum - Jumpers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

"Amador Perera," Silvano said softly. "Sweet Jesus, you're his son." His laugh was low and bitter. "You
told me your damn name. I guess I'm getting senile after all."

He was going to throw Joaquin out. Haul him off in the hover and dump him. You could hear it in his
voice, like the whisper of frost forming on a freezing night. "Don't." Joaquin leaned forward. "I'm so close.
I just need one good recording to dump into the net, and I've finally got all the bugs in this set-up worked
out. If I get it uploaded onto the net, he won't ever be able to delete every mention of it, no matter how
hard he tries. He won't give me another chance to do this."

"I don't get it." Silvano looked him, eyes hooded. "If nobody cares about this, why does he?"

"You don't get it. I just need the two weeks." He was begging and didn't care. "Let me stay here.
Please."

Silvano was staring at him, his expression unreadable in the glow of the empty monitor. He let his breath
out slowly. "It's too late to regret, I guess. Fine. You can stay." He rose to his feet, vanished into the
darkness.

"He is afraid," Zlia breathed in Joaquin's ear. This time he didn't start.

"I warned him. He should have listened to me."
Zlia touched his cheek lightly. "Maybe the ghosts will not come if you watch. Ghosts are shy."

"I told you they're not ghosts." Suddenly angry at the blank screen, at Silvano's gift, Joaquin turned his
back on the monitor. "There are no ghosts," he hissed at her. "That's superstition. Everything is
phenomenon."

"Silvano is a ghost." She lifted her head and smiled a sad smile. "I think he died before he came here.
Perhaps that is why he wants so much to buy the eggs for me."

"What eggs are these, anyway?" He crossed his arms, refusing to look at the monitor. An alarm would
sound if anything fell through the net. "New frog eggs?"

"My eggs." She tilted her head. "So that there will be others like me."

"Others?" He leaned forward, the monitor forgotten. "You mean that you are the only one?"

She shrugged, her fingers in her mass of hair. "Once upon a time, Silvano says that my grandparents
worked for the Plantation. They harvested the special fruits that the trees produced. They were better
than machines. Then the engineers discovered that the trees could give more if they harvested what they
needed from the sap." She lowered her hand. "Then the World Council passed the law that no one could
тАж be like us." She looked away. "The Plantation people one day тАж killed my grandparents and all the
others. Except for a fewтАФlike my motherтАФwho escaped. I was тАж a baby. I am the last, since my
mother fell and died." A tiny frog sat in the middle of her palm.

It wouldn't have been her real mother, Joaquin thought. She had been crafted in a lab, started in a petrie
dish. But maybe mother went beyond womb and genes. He looked at the frog in her palm. It was sky
blue with a scarlet belly and throat. It stared up unblinking at Joaquin as Zlia reached for his hand and
placed it gently, firmly down on the frog. It squirmed a little, cool and slick beneath his palm. He tried to