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

A ten-year-old boy sat on the throne of the Mughal Emperor.

Live twice as long, but age half as fast. The best deal Kolkata’s genetic engineers could strike with four
million years of human DNA. A child husband for a once-child goddess. Except this was no child. In
legal standing, experience, education, taste, and emotions, this was a twenty-year-old man, every way
except the physical.

His feet did not touch the floor.

“Quite, quite extraordinary.” His voice was a boy’s. He slipped from his throne, walked around me,
studying me as if I were an artifact in a museum. He was a head shorter than me. “Yes, this is indeed
special. What is the settlement?”

Mamaji’s voice from the door named a number. I obeyed my training and tried not to catch his eye as he
stalked around me.

“Acceptable. My man will deliver the prenuptial before the end of the week. A goddess. My goddess.”

Then I caught his eyes and I saw where all his missing years were. They were blue, alien blue, and colder
than any of the lights of his tower-top palace.



These Brahmins are worse than any of us when it comes to social climbing, Ashok messaged me in
my aerie atop the shaadi haveli, prison turned bridal boudoir. Castes within castes within castes. His
words hung in the air over the hazy ramparts of the red fort before dissolving into the dashings of the
musical pigeons. Your children will be blessed.

Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.

On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a climate-control bubble on the
manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as
Kumari. My husband, veiled in gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a
dozen elephants with colored patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots patrolled the grounds as
astrologers proclaimed favorable auspices and an old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union.
Rose petals fluttered around me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their
guests, my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile old Shweta went
round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. As we were applauded and played down
the receiving line, I noticed all the other somber-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign
wives. I reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.

I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after face, mouth after mouth
after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass after glass after glass of French champagne. I did
not drink for I do not have the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and
smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western tradition we were
adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my parents.

We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an aircraft. I pressed my hands,
still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting