ladylike: переводы

→Dairine vanished through the living room and up the stairs to her bedroom.

→“I really am sorry,” Dairine said, very, very low. Nita listened to the words,
judging the tone critically, and gave Dairine about a six on a scale of ten for
penitence. As Dairine hurried through the dining room past her, Nita kept her face
carefully straight, but the glance that Dairine threw at her, knowing their dad couldn’t
see it, made Nita revise the score about half a point upward. Dairine was angry, but
also genuinely sorry.

→Nita’s dad gave Dairine that terrible level look again. “Dairine, I think you
should go take some private time to consider what you’ve been up to,” he said.

→Tom snapped his manual closed and tossed it into the air. It vanished. “Next
time,” Tom said, “think it through.”

→“Aww, Tom!”

→“I, however, don’t have that much leeway,” Tom said. “The message the
Powers That Be dropped on my head, after this one, requires me to restrict you to
Sol System for the next two weeks, as a corrective. So consider it done.”

→“Uh-oh,” Spot said again.

→“Well, who then?”

→It was surprising how much expression a closed computer case could seem to
have, at least as far as Spot was concerned. He managed to look not only nervous
but embarrassed. “Not me,” Spot said.

→“Some of that stuff in there needs to be polished,” her dad said. “It’s all
brown. Never mind. You got a problem, big guy?”

→Spot, however, had equipment that no other laptop had, as far as Nita
knew—not just sentience but (at least sometimes) legs. These—all ten of them,
silvery and with two ball-and-socket joints each—now popped out and wiggled and
rowed and made helpless circles in the air while Nita’s dad held Spot up, blowing a
little dislodged cupboard dust off the top of him.

→“Come on,” Nita’s dad said, “let’s have a look at you.” He reached down
into the bottom of the cupboard, in among the unpolished silver and the big serving
plates, and brought out the little laptop computer. It had been undergoing some
changes recently, what Dairine referred to as an “upgrade.” In this case, upgrading
seemed to involve getting smaller and cooler looking, so that a computer that had
once been fairly big and heavy was now not much bigger than a large paperback
book in a dark silvery case.

→Nita’s dad looked into the dining room and spied something. “Hey, wait, I see
where he is,” he said, and went to the corner behind the dining room table. There
was a little cupboard and pantry area there, set into the wall, and one of the lower
cupboard’s doors was partly open. Nita’s dad looked into it. “What’s the matter
with you, fella?”“Uh-oh,” said Spot’s voice, much smaller still.

→“I don’t know. I looked for him before, but I couldn’t see him. Dairine can
probably tell us when she gets back. So, Daddy, about the shopping...”

→“Where is he?”

→“I don’t know,” Nita said. “He’s been doing that every now and then since I
got home.”

→“What’s the matter with him?”

→“It’s Spot,” said Nita.

→Nita’s dad glanced up, and both of them looked around. “What?” he said.

→“Uh-oh,” said a little voice.