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

you need to do . . . if you need to leave me, go your own way . . . then please


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do so. I've never stopped you before and I don't intend to do so now. If this is
what you wish."

She let out her breath. "That's what I wish, Milos."

"All right, Genevieve." He paused again. "I'll send a message to our bank and
have them transfer some money from our account to your own. You'll be
comfortable until I get back."

She nodded her head. "Thank you." Hesitation. "When will you . . . ?"

"I don't know. It will be at least another year. Perhaps longer. You'll have
plenty of time to chase all those young Belgian studs, eh?"

She smiled, but she couldn't muster the strength to laugh. "You're my only
lover, Milos," she said, hearing her voice crack. "I'm too old to go sleeping
with art students anymore."

"Just as well. They might give you a disease. Artists are like that, you know."

The joke fell flat; neither of them laughed. They gazed at each other for a
time, their faces invisible to each other behind glass masks. When she found her
voice again, it was only as a whisper.

"Why?" she asked.

For a moment he didn't reply. "We are imperfect creatures, you and I," he said
at last. "We are born, we live out our short and fragile lives, we grow old and
then we die. In a few years, no one will remember if we ever lived at all."

He lifted a gloved hand to the sky above his easel. "But this, my love...this is
perfection. It is eternal, it is always changing, and it is perfect. Even if I
were to paint it two dozen times, a hundred times, even a thousand, I shall
never get it right."

For the first time since she had exited the base, Genevieve lifted her eyes from
the ground. Before her, just past the short horizon of the shepherd moon, Saturn
was an immense wall across the sky. Mimas was the sixth inmost satellite of the
planet's miniature solar system; from this vantage point, less than two hundred
thousand kilometers from its swirling cloudtips, Saturn blotted out the stars,
larger than anything human eyes had ever seen. Its rings rose vertically as a
straight, silver arch, bisecting the vast world, their shadows falling across
the red and orange cloud bands which moved in grand, constant fluctuation, never
appearing quite the same way twice.