"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Room of Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

I don’t do much any more. Except sit in the old spacer’s bar on
Longbow and wait for tourists to contact me for a job. Then I plan the visit,
go to the wreck, plant some souvenirs, come back, pick up the tourists and
give them the thrill of their lives.

With no danger, no risk.

No excitement.

The opposite of what I used to do.

****

She’s land-born. I don’t need to see her thick body with its heavy
bones to know that. Her walk says it all.

The space-born have a grace—a lightness—to everything they do.
Not all are thin-boned and fragile. Some have parents who think ahead, who
raise them half in Earth Normal and half in zero-G. The bones develop, but
that grace—that lightness—it develops, too.

This woman has a heaviness, a way of putting one foot in front of the
other as if she expects the floor to take her weight. I used to walk like that. I
spent my first fifteen years mostly planet-bound in real gravity.

We have the same build, she and I—that thickness which comes from
strong bones, the fully formed female body that comes from the good
nutrition usually found planetside.
 I used to fight both of those things until I realized they gave me an
advantage spacers usually don’t have.

I don’t break.

Grab a spacer wrong and her arms snap.

Grab me wrong, and I’ll bruise.

She sits down, says my name as if she’s entitled to, and then raises
her eyebrows as if they and not the tone of her voice provide the question
mark.

“How’d you get in here?” I pull my drink across the scarred plastic
table and lean my chair against the wall. Balancing chairs feels like that
second after the gravity gets shut off but hasn’t yet vanished—a
half-and-half feeling of being both weighted and weightless.

“I have an invitation,” she says and holds up the cheap St.
Christopher’s medal that houses this week’s guest chip. Station
management shifts the chip housing every week or two so the chips can’t