"Connie Willis - Blued Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

That isn't the prob-lem. They're nice, but they're incoherent. A viable relation-ship. What on
earth was that? And what was "respecting your personal space"? Or "fulfilling each other's
socio-economic needs"? I have no idea what they are talking about. Sally thought. I have be
going out with a bunch of foreigners.
 She put her coat and her hat back on and started down in the elevator to find her father. P
man. He knew what it was like to be married to someone who didn't speak English. She cou
imagine what the conversation with her mother had been like. All sisters and sexist pigs. Sh
hadn't been speak-ing ERA very long. The last time she called, she had been speaking EST
the time before that California. It was no wonder Sally's father had hired a secretary that
communi-cated almost entirely through sighs, and that Sally had ma-jored in English.

Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice
young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would n
understand a word they said.

It suddenly occurred to her that the company linguist, Ulric something, might speak Engl
and she punched in her security code all over again and went back up in the elevator to get
printout with his address on it. She decided to go through the oriental gardens to get to
Research instead of taking the car. She told herself it was shorter, which was true, but she w
really thinking that if she went through them, she would go past the housing unit where Ulric
Henry lived.

The oriental gardens had originally been designed as a shortcut through the maze of
fast-food places that had sprung up around Mowen Chemical, making it impossible to get
anywhere quickly. Her father had purposely stuck Mowen Chemical on the outskirts of
Chugwater so the plant wouldn't disturb the natives, trying to make the original buildings an
housing blend in to the Wyoming landscape. The natives had promptly disturbed Mowen
Chemical, so that by the time they built the Research complex and computer center, the only
land not covered with Kentucky Fried Chickens and Arbys was in the older part of town an
very far from the original buildings. Mr. Mowen had given up trying not to disturb the nativ
He had built the oriental gardens so that at least people could get from home to work and ba
again without being run over by the Chugwaterians. Actually, he had in-tended just to put in
brick path that would wind through the original Mowen buildings and connect them with the
new ones, but at the time Charlotte had been speaking Zen. She had insisted on bonsais and
curving bridge over the irriga-tion ditch. Before the landscaping was finished, she had
switched to an Anti-Watt dialect that had put an end to the marriage and sent Sally flying of
east to school. During that same period her mother had campaigned to save the dead
cottonwood she was standing under now, picketing her hus-band's office with signs that rea
"Tree Murderer!"

Sally stood under the dead cottonwood tree, counting the windows so she could figure o
which was Ulric Henry's apartment. There were three windows on the sixth floor with ligh
all three, and the middle window was open for some unknown reason, but it would require
incredible coinci-dence to have Ulric Henry come and stand at one of the windows while S
was standing there so she could shout up to him, "Do you speak English?"

I wasn't looking for him anyway, she told herself stub-bornly, I'm on my way to meet my
father, and I stopped to look at the moon. My, it certainly is a peculiar blue color tonight. S
stood a few minutes longer under the tree, pretending to look at the moon, but it was getting
very cold, the moon did not seem to be getting any bluer, and even if it were, it did not seem