"Joe Haldeman - For White Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Of course not." She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least
one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. "Galan, an island on Seldene. I've studied your cultures, a little
language."

"You don't dress like that on Seldene, either." Not anywhere I'd been on the planet.

"Only at the beach. It's so warm here."

I had to agree. Before I came out, they'd told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe
and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock,
which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. "My name is
White Hill. Zephyr Meadow-Torrent."

"Where are the others?" I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world.
The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

"Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration."

"You've already been around?"

"No." She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. "All the
story's here, anywhere. It isn't really about history or culture."

Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. "Did you visit my
world when you were studying it?"

"No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago." She smiled at me. "It was almost as
beautiful as I'd imagined it." She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn't say it precisely in English,
which doesn't have a palindromic mood:Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

"When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I've learned a lot from your
sculpture, though."

"How young can you be?" To earn this honor, I did not say.

"In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-squeeze."

I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that's about
forty-five years' squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than foray light-years from her planet. That leaves
enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.

She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. "Don't overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to
ThetaKent after your world."

"Really? When I was there?"

"No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went." She made a
palindrome in my language:Predator becomes prey becomes predator? "So here we are. Perhaps I can