"Frankowski, Leo - Stargard 3 - The Radiant Warrior" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

“Everything. That whole show could have been simulated by a computer and displayed in one of our tanks to a degree of accuracy such that you couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Would it have been the same?”

“Hmm… No, somehow I don’t think so, but I'm not sure why.”

“Well I am. What makes ballet or any other art form worthwhile is the fact that it is done by people. When you watched the dancers, you were putting yourself in their place, imagining what they were thinking and feeling. A recording or transmission of that performance would not have been as good, because you would have been farther removed from the people doing it. A mere computer display of the same show would have been absolutely worthless.”

“But if you didn’t know-”

“Maybe you could have been fooled. But you would have been angry when you found out. Back to that dead family. It was an onion mold got them. Toxin 8771 from mold 15395, extinct in 1462. The really deadly ones don’t last very long. Killing your host, or the people who cultivate your host, is bad ecology and not good for your own survival.”

He hit the START button.




Chapter Three


My monthly two-day visits to Okoitz were used to supervise the construction there, but just then there wasn’t much to do. The cloth factory was shut down until spring. Without glass or a decent light, the only way you could work indoors was next to an open window, a little rough in this weather. At that, you could only get in six hours a day in good weather.

I checked out the wet mill that sawed wood, worked hammers, and did all sorts of work. There were thousands of tons of water in there, and if it froze, the mill would be wrecked. I checked each of the tanks, but everything was still liquid. The walls of the mill were a half a yard thick at the thinnest, and that much wood is a good insulator even if it is wet. The windmill kept turning even when it wasn’t in use, and my calculations had shown that the energy imparted should keep the water warm enough even in the worst weather. But theoretical calculations are often a long ways from reality! I was relieved.

Work was progressing on the grain mill, but it was simpler than the wet mill we’d built last summer, and Vitold, the carpenter, needed no help from me.

Quite a bit of logging was going on, mostly to clear land for pasturing more sheep. Count Lambert had been buying wool to keep his mill running, and he thought that this was stupid. They were using the steel saws I’d shown the smiths in Cieszyn how to make, but they didn't need my help.

So I took a sauna to make sure that I wasn’t carrying anything communicable, and then looked up Kotcha.

I sort of fell into the position of Janina’s sister's foster parent. Janina was living in my household, and in fact I slept with her some of the time, so I suppose that the relationship was a natural one. Kotcha was silent through the mass and funeral ceremony. The world can be very brutal when you're nine years old. After her family was in the ground, she wanted to talk to Anna.

My mount was not an ordinary horse. She was a bioengineered creation from some advanced civilization somewhere. Or maybe I should say somewhen, because Anna said they were in the distant past and they used time machines, which she didn’t understand. She couldn't talk, of course, but she could spell things out. She was intelligent in an odd sort of way, and she was a full member of my household. She even got paid like everybody else, not that she spends much of it. Most adults wouldn't believe any of this, but a nine-year-old girl has no such difficulty. They were good friends.

“Kotcha, do you think that you would like to come to Three Walls with Anna and me?”

“Where would I live?”

“Why, in my household, with your sister and me and Anna.”

“Anna lives in your house?”

“Some of the time, and it’s more of an apartment than a house. Anna has a stall in the barn, too, but most of the time she sleeps in the living room.”.

“Could I sleep with Anna?”

“if you want to. Or you could sleep with your sister or even have a room of your own, except when we have company over. I bet you’d take good care of Anna. She gets a good grooming in the barn, but I've always felt that she deserves special care.”

Anna nodded her head, Yes. Then she tapped her right forehoof and scratched the ground with her left. We had this code worked out.

“You want something that you want to pay for,” I said to Anna. “You mean you want to hire Kotcha?”