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

her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way
inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so
old. I willed it down before she could see.

"It's a language I don't know," she said: "Not Portuguese; looks like Latin. A Christian church, probably,
Catholic."

"They used water in their religion," I remembered. "Is that why it's close to the sea?"

"They were everywhere; sea, mountains, orbit. They got to Petros?"

"We still have some. I've never met one, but they have a church in New Haven."

"As who doesn't?" She pointed up a road. "Come on. The beach is just over the rise here."

I could smelts it before I saw it. It wasn't an ocean smell; it was dry, slightly choking.

We turned a corner and I stood staring. "It's a deep blue farther out," she said, "and so clear you can see
hundreds of metras down." Here the water was thick and brown, the surf foaming heavily like a giant's
chocolate drink, mud piled in baked windrows along the beach. "This used to be soil?"

She nodded. "There's a huge river that cuts this continent in half, the Amazon. When the plants died,
there was nothing to hold the soil in place." She tugged me forward. "Do you swim? Come on."

"Swim inthat? It's filthy."

"No, it's perfectly sterile. Besides, I have to pee." Well, I couldn't argue with that. I left the box on a high
fragment of fallen wall and followed her. When we got to the beach, she broke into a run. I walked
slowly and watched her gracile body, instead, and waded into the slippery heavy surf. When it was deep
enough to swim, I plowed my way out to where she was bobbing. The water was too hot to be pleasant,
and breathing was somewhat difficult. Carbon dioxide, I supposed, with a tang of halogen.

We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It
was tiring, more from the water's heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.

2

We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a
beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.

We could have been a couple of precivilization aboriginals, painted with dirt, our hair baked into stringy
mats. She looked odd but still had a kind of formal beauty, the dusty mud residue turning her into a
primitive sculpture, impossibly accurate and mobile. Dark rivulets of sweat drew painterly accent lines
along her face and body. If only she were a model, rather than an artist. Hold that pose while I go back
for my brushes.

We shared the small bottles of cold wine and water and ate bread and cheese and fruit. I put a piece on
the ground for the nanophages. We watched it in silence for some minutes, while nothing happened. "It
probably takes hours or days," she finally said.