"Geoffrey A. Landis - Lazy Taekos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Lazy Taekos by Geoffrey A. Landis
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This may look like a fairytale for lawyers, but it is science fiction, too!
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Once there was a boy named Taekos who lived on a heart farm.

His parents were hardworking people: they grew new hearts for old men, and tiny hearts for babies; they
grew strong hearts to plant into young men who had crashed their air-scooters and needed replacements;
and they grew rugged working hearts for androids who were grown in a vat.

But Taekos didn't want to live on the farm. He was lazy, and wanted to do something that was more fun
and less like work.

One day he slung his pack over his shoulder and told his parents he was off to seek his fortune in the big
city. He hitched a ride with a passing businessman driving an old-fashioned one-wheeled gyro-car, and in
a few minutes he was in the big city.

In the big city, he apprenticed himself to a robot builder, but his robots were built all askew, and didn't
want to work, but just sat and wrote poetry all day. No one would pay to buy a robot to sit around and
write poetry, and so after a week, he was let go.

He apprenticed himself to a bioengineer, but he was too lazy to sculpt DNA, and spent the day
programming the microrobots to play croquet with each other, using xenon atoms as balls. And then,
when he was bored with that, he programmed them to gather all the atoms of one kind together--copper,
he decided, he would make them gather copper atoms--and link them together in a sheet, until the floor
shone with a molecule-thick plating of copper. But no one would pay to hire a bioengineer who would
not splice even a single DNA strand, and so after a week he was let go.

He apprenticed himself to a spaceship pilot, but he just flew his ship in great lazy swirls around the sky.
The businessmen who were to be ferried to the seven moons refused to pay him, and so after a week he
was let go.

And thus it was, when he had used up all his prospects, and no one in the city would take him on as an
apprentice, he sat in the park. He sat by the river of floating flowers, singing nonsense songs to himself
and giving names to each of the clouds that passed in the sky. He was braiding together great kjill
blossoms to make kites, and releasing them one by one to drift in the sky, when he saw a girl watching
him.

After a while he saw one of his blossom kites float through her, and he knew she was a projection. Ah,
he thought. If she didn't eat and didn't need to pay to enter an entertainment, it would cost nothing to take
her out. She was the perfect girlfriend for him.

"Will you be my girlfriend?" he asked.

"Certainly," she answered. As they talked together, he discovered that she had a dowry of ten trillion
pretty rocks from her grandfather, but until the day she married, she told him, her stepfather controlled it,
and she could not spend any of it, not even a single rock, except what her stepfather allowed.

Her stepfather was crafty, and did not want her to wed, and take away his fortune. He had locked her
away in a titanium crystal castle, and the robots that controlled it would only let in the man who would