"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

service/military for matrimonials. Now it was a bride-parade, a marriage-market for lonely men with
large dowries. Dowries that paid a hefty commission to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency.

The Lovely Girls lined up on the left side of the Silken Wall that ran the length of the bungalow garden.
The first twelve men formed up on the right. They plumped and preened in their finery but I could see
they were nervous. The partition was no more than a row of saris pinned to a line strung between plastic
uprights, fluttering in the rising evening wind. A token of decorum. Purdah. They were not even silk.

Reshmi was first to walk and talk the Silken Wall. She was a Yadav country girl from Uttaranchal,
big-handed and big-faced. A peasant’s daughter. She could cook and sew and sing, do household
accounts, manage both domestic aeais and human staff. Her first prospective was a weasely man with a
weak jaw in government whites and a Nehru cap. He had bad teeth. Never good. Any one of us could
have told him he was wasting his shaadi fee, but they namasted to each other and stepped out,
regulation three paces between them. At the end of the walk Reshmi would loop back to rejoin the tail of
the line and meet her next prospective. On big shaadis like this my feet would bleed by the end of the
night. Red footprints on the marble floors of Mamaji’s courtyard haveli.

I stepped out with Ashok, a big globe of a thirty-two-year-old who wheezed a little as he rolled along.
He was dressed in a voluminous white kurta, the fashion this season though he was fourth generation
Punjabi. His grooming amounted to an uncontrollable beard and oily hair that smelled of too much
Dapper Deepak pomade. Even before he namasted I knew it was his first shaadi. I could see his
eyeballs move as he read my résumé, seeming to hover before him. I did not need to read his to know he
was a dataraja, for he talked about nothing but himself and the brilliant things he was doing; the spec of
some new protein processor array, the ’ware he was breeding, the aeais he was nurturing in his stables,
his trips to Europe and the United States where everyone knew his name and great people were glad to
welcome him.

“Of course, Awadh’s never going to ratify the Hamilton Acts—no matter how close Shrivastava Minister
is to President McAuley—but if it did, if we allow ourselves that tiny counterfactual—well, it’s the end of
the economy: Awadh is IT, there are more graduates in Mehrauli than there are in the whole of
California. The Americans may go on about the mockery of a human soul, but they need our Level
2.8s—you know what that is? An aeai can pass as human 99 percent of the time—because everybody
know no one does quantum crypto like us, so I’m not worrying about having to close up the data-haven,
and even if they do, well, there’s always Bharat—I cannot see the Ranas bowing down to Washington,
not when 25 percent of their forex comes out of licensing deals from Town and Country . . . and that’s
hundred percent aeai generated. . . .”

He was a big affable clown of a man with wealth that would have bought my Palace in Durbar Square
and every priest in it and I found myself praying to Taleju to save me from marrying such a bore. He
stopped in mid-stride, so abruptly I almost tripped.

“You must keep walking,” I hissed. “That is the rule.”

“Wow,” he said, standing stupid, eyes round in surprise. Couples piled up behind us. In my peripheral
vision I could see Mamaji making urgent, threatening gestures. Get him on. “Oh wow. You’re an
ex-Kumari.”

“Please, you are drawing attention to yourself.” I would have tugged his arm, but that would have been
an even more deadly error.