"Matthew Woodring Stover - Caine 02 - Blade of Tyshalle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stover Matthew Woodring)

fine grasp of Westerling and is coming along very well in First Continent cultural
mores, but as you can see, he can barely maintain alpha, let alone moving to the
beta consciousness required for effective spellcasting, and we, we're working only
with Distraction Level Two, approximately what he will find in, say, a private room in
a metropolitan inn, and under these circumstances I simply don't believe—"


"Shut up, will you?" says the other man on the techdeck. "Christ, you make
me tired."


"I, ahm ..." Administrator Chandra runs a hand through his thinning hair,
sweat-slick despite the climate control. "Yes, Businessman."


Businessman Marc Vilo, the Patron of the student in question, rolls the thick
stinking cigar around his mouth as he stumps forward to get a better view through
the glass panel.
 Businessman Vilo is, a short, skinny, bowlegged man with the manners of a
dockhand and the jittery energy of a fighting cock. I've seen him in the netfeatures
plenty of times; he's an unimpressive figure in his conservative jumpsuit and cloak,
until you remember that he'd been born into a Tradesman family; he'd taken over
the family business, a three-truck transport firm, and had built it into the Business
powerhouse Vilo Intercontinental. Still only in his mid-forties, he had purchased his
family's contract from their Business Patron, bought his way into the Business caste,
and was now one of the wealthiest men—outside the Leisure Families—in the
Western Hemisphere. Netfeatures call him the Happy Billionaire.


This is why Administrator Chandra is here right now; normally the
Administrator has much more important duties than entertaining visiting Patrons. But
Vilo's protégé-the very first he has ever sponsored into the Conservatory—is failing
miserably and is about to wash out, and the Administrator wants to soothe the sting,
and perhaps retain a certain degree of goodwill, in hopes that Vilo will sponsor
further students in the future. This is a business he's running here, after all.
Sponsoring an Actor can be extremely lucrative, if the Actor becomes successful just
ask my father. The Administrator wants to make Vilo see that this is only a single
failed investment, and is no reason to believe that further investments of this nature
will also fail. "There is also, ehm, a, well, a certain history of disciplinary problems—"


"Thought I told you to shut up:' Vilo continues to stare down at his protégé, a
slightly built boy named Hari Michaelson, nineteen years old, a Laborer from San
Francisco.


The boy kneels on his meter-square mat of scuffed plastic, hands curled in
Three Finger technique. Of the thirty students in the room, only he has his eyes
closed. The monitors on his temples that feed data into the Conservatory computer
tell the whole story: Despite the slow three-per-minute rhythm of his breath, his