"Stars - 01 - Four Hundred Billion Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

the catwalk's railing, the seaweed and barnacles that crusted the scarred hide
sliding by. She had to wear a poncho because sometimes a whale would vent a
fetid oily spray. Dorthy didn't like that, and she didn't like the moment when
the electrodes closed and sent a brief fierce shudder through the long body. The
stench then was like burning water. She would jump, too, and her father would
pick her up and smile at her: this was a joke, to him. That was where her Uncle
Mishio worked. Dorthy was afraid of his scarred, one-eyed face.
The stench of rendering blubber hung over the yard and the little town all
summer. Everyone was hoarse within days of the opening of the whaling season,
and the apts became stifling because the windows couldn't be opened. But it was
the smell of money. The town was a company town, and the flensing yard was its
only industry.
Dorthy's father brought a little concentrated cloud of this stink home each
night, and slowly lost it to the hot water of the bath Dorthy's mother had
already drawn for him. Dorthy and her small sister, Hiroko, had to be quiet
while their father lolled in steamy water, nibbling tidbits his wife had
prepared as he watched the trivia stage, before leaving to meet Uncle Mishio at
one or other of the bars. Dorthy's mother wasn't Japanese, and in marrying her,
Dorthy's father had earned his family's grave and continuing disapproval. As if
in expiation of this unhealed rift, he had become fanatical in practising the
old, orthodox ways, the ways of life before the Exodus, and his wife had become
a martyr to his fanaticism - perhaps that was the point, although Dorthy only
realized this years later, when her mother was dead and her father ruined by
drink, bad company, and worse luck.
The little apt with its concrete walls hidden by paper hangings, its concrete
floors strewn with tatami matting, the brightly painted Shinto altar in one
corner, the charcoal stove with its perpetually bubbling teapot, beside which
Dorthy's mother squatted as she stirred a fish stew… and the two dozen other apt
blocks, the little row of shops and bars, and the large houses of the yard
engineers and managers on the hill that rose above the little town, the ocean on
one side and the bush on the other, sealed by the blank blue sky that was only
occasionally cracked by the remote howl of an air-car… Dorthy's Talent had taken
her away from all that, just as it had taken her away from her research out
beyond the orbit of Pluto. So quiet out there. No mind but her own, and the sun
shrunken to merely another bright star among the myriad others.
Dorthy woke to darkness that smelt of antiseptic, a sharp tang that overlay
another, half-remembered odour. Her first thought was that she had failed again
(once with bleach, once with a sharpened table knife, once she had tried to
drown herself in the spherical pool at the weightless heart of the Institute).
Pressure lay tightly across her shoulders, became apparent over her body when
she tried to move. Not the Institute, that had been years ago. Was she still in
the dropcapsule?
Then the little room flooded with light.
A face swam in her blurred vision. Dorthy twisted away from it and something
stung her arm.
Sliding under silver. Sleep.
After the Institute it seemed to Dorthy that her Talent had always been with
her, but in her early childhood it had been latent, untrained and unfocused, and
she had not recognized it for what it was. After all, no child likes to think it
is different.