"Allen Steele - Shepherd Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

from the gritty, frozen ground beneath her boots as she pulled herself hand over
hand along the cables out to the place where her husband had set up his easel.

She didn't want to go. Her breath panted loudly within her helmet as she
struggled against the ropes, each exhalation briefly clouding the faceplate of
her helmet. She still loved him. Another step taken; another choice made. She
didn't want to go. Her feet felt like dead weights with every step she took. She
still loved him, and she didn't want to go. . . .

And suddenly, before she was aware of the distance she had overcome, she was
with her husband.

He sat on a metal stool in front of his tripod-mounted easel, his palette
strapped to his lap, his back turned to her. The stool and the easel had been
bolted to the surface, and more straps around his waist kept him from floating


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away. Perhaps, she briefly wondered -- not for the first time -- it might have
been merciful if he had forgotten to tie himself down just once, so that a
random movement such as the restless shifting of a leg might have pitched him
off the moon's surface, outward and away. . . .

It would have made all this unnecessary.

He didn't look up from his work. He didn't even know she was here. She took
another deep breath, reconsidered one last time what she was about to say and
do, and then touched the stud on the left wrist of her suit which opened the
comlink.

"Milos," she said.

There was no overt reaction on his part, nor had she expected any. He remained
crouched over his palette, his helmet's faceplate turned toward the electronic
canvas mounted on the easel. Yet his right hand froze above the canvas, his
forefinger hovering a centimeter above the wide black screen.

"Umm . . . Genevieve? Yes, dear?"

His voice was a distracted blur. He was cordial, yet she knew how much he hated
to be disturbed. It had always been like this. When they had lived on Earth, in
the fondly remembered years shortly after their marriage, he had locked himself
in his studio for days on end, regardless of whether it had been in Rome or San
Antonio or Brussels, and when they had followed his new obsession out into space
it had been the same, whether he was on the orbital colonies or on the Moon or
on Mars. He could be polite, so long as he wasn't bothered for more than a
minute. . . .