"Linda Nagata - Hooks, Nets & Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nagata Linda)

He set off at an easy pace on the only route the station offered: a 5K lap around the photovoltaic decking
built atop the steel mesh wall of the shark pen. At high tide the deck was a meter above the water, with
the open sea on one side and the enclosed waters of the pen on the other.

Zayder had run this makeshift track twice every morning for almost a year. Boredom had been left
behind long ago. Now, his mind automatically faded into a passive altered state before he finished the first
hundred meters. Conversations rose from his past to fill his consciousness, insignificant exchanges: a joke
offered to college acquaintances in a bar; polite questioning of a professor; a cautious response to the
inquiries of a government personnel officer hiring biologists for the wildlife refuge at Moro Bay; and yet
another personnel officer, hiring for the marine sanctuary in the Gulf of California, and another and
another, until they all seemed to be different versions of the same bad news: I'm sorry. You have an
excellent record and your thesis is impressive, but I'm afraid you're not quite right for us....

He studied every word, searching for some point where -- if only he'd phrased things differently -- events
would have taken a more positive path. An absurd exercise. He already knew the point when his career
in marine biology had been lost. It had happened even before he knew what a career was, when he'd
been arrested at seventeen for poaching.

It had meant nothing to him at the time. He'd been working for his Dad, hunting pelagic sharks for a
dealer, who preserved the bodies and sold them as dramatic ornaments for coastal mansions. Zayder's
family had been deep water fishermen for generations. But as natural resources dwindled, what had been
an honest occupation gradually became a crime, and an arrest for poaching just another risk of the
business.

But the wealthy patrons who supported refuges and sanctuaries around the world didn't see it in that
practical light. No refuge manager would want his patron's newsletter to ring with the headline: Former
poacher hired as field biologist.

It had never mattered how well he did in school.

But he'd come too far in life to go back to the boats, so he'd taken a job with Mr. Ryan instead. Ryan
did not believe in nonprofit enterprises. When a U.N. mandate required every corporate entity that
generated potential ocean garbage to construct and maintain an Ocean Hazards Collection Station, Ryan
had expanded on the design by adding the shark pen.

Shark fins were much in demand and now nearly unobtainable since the wild populations had been
hunted almost to extinction. Tiburon's fins alone would fetch twice Zayder's yearly wages each time they
could be regrown and harvested. Ryan's select market held the great white shark in high esteem: no other
great white had been reported in nearly five years. Speculation held the captive animal to be the last of its
species.

But beyond the income from fins, the station was useful to Ryan in other ways. So Zayder finally found
himself employed again, master of a remote world built on a reef in the South China Sea.

The deep blue sky lightened as he ran. The pink fair-weather clouds that hugged the horizon gradually
brightened until they were bathed in brilliant white. A moment later the rim of the sun appeared above the
water. Zayder ducked his head, his thoughts blown back to the present by the sudden blast of daylight.

A hundred meters out on the sun-burnished water a black torpedo armed with a spine of pentagonal fins
scudded towards the station: one of the robotic garbage trawlers being driven home by a combination of