"WILHELM, KATE - JUSTICE FOR SOME" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

Today, people at the central table were packing plants for shipping;
rolls of the green feltlike material hung over the table, rolls of heavy
plastic, rolls of plastic bags, flattened plastic-lined boxes in stacks,
insulation, plastic bins with labels... The water gardens did a big
mail-order business, and this was their busy season. She nodded to the
few people who glanced up at her, and went on past to where she had
spotted Virgil and Maria.

They appeared to be performing surgery at the tanks of water lilies.

Most of the workers in here wore shorts, some of the women wore halters,
and everyone looked very moist.

Maria had on a white T-shirt and white shorts, rubber thongs on her
feet. Her skin glistened. Virgil had cut-off jeans and no shirt. He was
very tanned. He had missed out on the frizzy-hair genes from their
mother, and had got the smooth, dark., slightly wavy hair from their
father. And no freckles. So, Winnie sometimes told herself, aiming at a
philosophy that was bearable, her little brother got the good looks and
she got the brain. Fair enough. But it irked sometimes, like now, to see
him looking so handsome, so comfortable when she felt like something
just out of the dishwasher. And Maria Florinda looked like a model
pretending to be a botanist. She was beautiful, with long black hair
that she had pulled off her back and neck in a ponytail; she had fine
high cheekbones, and the coloring of a Polynesian princess.

Maria was detaching minute new plants from the leaf joints of a mature
water lily. The plantlets were no bigger than Winnie's little
fingernail. Maria's fingers were long and shapely, and very sure as she
wielded a scalpel to cut the new plant free from the parent, and handed
it to Virgil, who was just as steady and sure as he planted it in a
small pot, spread out hairlike roots with a dowel hardly thicker than a
toothpick; he added soil and sand, and finally lowered the pot gently
into a shallow tray with enough water to cover it. The little lancelike
leaves twisted, then rose through the water to the surface, where
they.floated. When he finished, Maria had another one ready.

"And LIFE goes on," Winnie murmured. They both looked up as if surprised
by her presence.

"Viviparous reproduction," Maria said. "Aren't they lovely? The little
ones?"

They were. Perfect Lilliputian water lilies. Neither Maria nor Virgil
moved, and suddenly Winnie felt awkward, like an intruder.

There had been some sort of communion here that she had interrupted.

"Just wanted to say we're all ready for the break of dawn tomorrow," she