"Timothy Zahn - Spinneret" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

keeping up, but Meredith wasn't overly concerned. Beaeki didn't seem bothered by
the possible breach of protocol, and as their conversation was being monitored via
Meredith's phone, the colonel didn't feel nervous when out of sight of his men.

What he did feel was surprise. Beaeki, he'd judged, was only mildly interested in
what the humans were building on Astra, and he'd accordingly been thinking
along the lines of a half-hour trip to Unie and back. But the Rooshrike, with no
trace of his earlier official coolness, asked question after question, and before he
knew it Meredith had launched them on a grand tour.

They began at the continental shelf due east of Martello Island, where the
mysterious mineral deposits lay clearly visible a few meters beneath the water.
Crossing the narrow strip of land that separated the ocean from the northernmost
finger of Splayfoot Bay, they came to the village of Wright, where the mined
minerals would eventually be separated and purified. The road from there to Unie
bordered both the bay and the Wright-Unie fanning area, and Meredith spent
several minutes talking about the special fertilization being used. He broke off the

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Zahn, Timothy - Spinneret


monologue when Beaeki explained that his race had little interest in plant
cultivation; on Rooshrike worlds, with solar energy up to thirty times more
abundant than on Earth, keeping the flora cut back was more of a problem than
persuading it to grow. The fish nurseries near Unie were far more to his interest,
inducing him even to stop the vehicle and get out. Squatting by the offshore mesh
pens, whose tops barely cleared the surface of the water, he peered into the depths
as Meredith described how the metal-rich runoff from the Crosse fields would be
carried by the river to the bay, where it would presumably allow the growth of
algae and more complex plants to which the penned fish would have access.

"You go to great lengths for such a useless world," Beaeki commented as they
headed toward Ceres.

"It may be the only other one we ever have," Meredith said sourly, "if the Ctencri
are to be believed. Besides, we humans are very big on challenges."

They made a fast circuit of CeresтАФwhere, thankfully, the workers were sticking
to business todayтАФlooked at Teardrop Lake, and then headed south to Crosse, at
the junction of whose rivers a second fish nursery was located.

And through it all, Meredith learned a great deal about the Rooshrike.

They were a young race, relatively speaking, technologically anywhere from
eighty to three hundred years behind the other starfaring races of the region. As
junior members of the six-nation trading association, they had chafed somewhat
under the perceived condescension of the older races, particularly that of the
Ctencri, and while they had rapidly built an empire of twenty colonies and bases,
they had always had the feeling none of the others really took them seriously.