"Connie Willis - Spice Pogrom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

to put them." He shook his head. "With all these reporters and tourists
coming up, there isn't a spare room on Sony."
"Can't you send some of these people back down to earth?" Chris said.
"I've got two little girls living on my stairs who're here because they think
Spielberg's bound to make a movie about the aliens so they came up here
to try to get a part in it, which is ridiculous. I'm not even sure Spielberg's
still alive, but if he is, he's got to be at least eighty. Isn't there some way to
send people like that home?"
"You know Sony's got an automatic thirty-day travel permission wait.
It's been in effect since Sony was first built so that immigrants couldn't
change their minds before they got over shuttle-lag. NASA's trying to get
the Japanese to limit the earth-to-Sony traffic, but so far they've refused
because they like all the business it's bringing up."
"Can't NASA put on its own limits? They own the shuttle."
"We don't want to jeopardize relations with the Japanese. We've got too
many of our own people who need to come up to see the aliens."
"And they're all using my bathroom," Chris said. "How long will it take
you to find another apartment for him?"
"Chris, darling, I don't think you understand the overcrowding problem
we've got over here. . . Hold on a second, will you?" he said, and flattened
and froze.
"We've got an overcrowding problem over here, too, Stewart," Chris
said. Someone rang the bell. "Come in," Chris shouted, and then was sorry.
Molly came in. "My mother thaid to tell you to get off the phone," she
said, lisping the word "said."
"I'm really six," Molly had told her without a trace of a lisp the day she
and her mother moved onto the landing outside Chris's apartment, "but
six is box-office poison, because your teeth are going to fall out pretty
soon, so my screen age is four and a half." She was certainly dressed to
look four and a half today, in a short yellow smock with ducks
embroidered on it and a giant yellow bow in her shingled brown bob.
"My mother thayth to tell you we're eckthpecting a call from my agent,"
she said, with her dimpled hands on her hips.
"Your mother does not have phone privileges in this apartment. Your
agent can call you on the pay phone in the hall."
"It'th a holo-call," Molly said, and strolled over to the piano. "He thaid
he'd call at thickthteen-thirty. Did you know thum new people moved in
on the thtairs today?"
"A slut and an old guy," Bets said, coming into the hall. She was
wearing a pink dress with a sash, pink ribbon bows, and black
patent-leather shoes. "My mother says to ask you how we're supposed to
get the lead in Spielberg's movie if we can't talk to our agent."
"How could new people move in?" Chris said. Molly's mother had sublet
half of the landing to Bets (who was also six according to Molly, even
though she swore she was five) and her mother last week, and Chris had
thought at the time that the only good thing about it was that nobody else
could move in because Mr. Nagisha's cousins were renting the hall outside
Chris's apartment, and Mr. Nagisha himself was living in the downstairs
hall.
"Mr. Nagithha rented them the thtairth," Molly said, plunking the