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

“Who were those funny people?” I asked. “They were both wearing very white shoes.”

“Your mother and father,” Tall Kumarima said. As she led me down the Durga corridor with the usual
order not to brush my free hand along the wooden walls for fear of splinters, I felt her grip tremble.
That night I dreamed the dream of my life, that is not a dream but one of my earliest experiences,
knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of my remembering. This was a memory I would not
admit in daylight, so it must come by night, to the secret door.

I am in the cage over a ravine. A river runs far below, milky with mud and silt, foaming cream over the
boulders and slabs sheared from the mountainsides. The cable spans the river from my home to the
summer grazing and I sit in the wire cage used to carry the goats across the river. At my back is the main
road, always loud with trucks, the prayer banners and Kinley bottled water sign of my family’s roadside
teahouse. My cage still sways from my uncle’s last kick. I see him, arms and legs wrapped around the
wire, grinning his gap-toothed grin. His face is summer-burned brown, his hands cracked and stained
from the trucks he services. Oil engrained in the creases. He wrinkles up his nose at me and unhooks a
leg to kick my cage forward on its pulley-wheel. Pulley sways cable sways mountains, sky and river
sway but I am safe in my little goat-cage. I have been kicked across this ravine many times. My uncle
inches forward. Thus we cross the river, by kicks and inches.

I never see what strikes him—some thing of the brain perhaps, like the sickness Lowlanders get when
they go up to the high country. But the next I look my uncle is clinging to the wire by his right arm and leg.
His left arm and leg hang down, shaking like a cow with its throat cut, shaking the wire and my little cage.
I am three years old and I think this is funny, a trick my uncle is doing just for me, so I shake back,
bouncing my cage, bouncing my uncle up and down, up and down. Half his body will not obey him and
he tries to move forward by sliding his leg along, like this, jerk his hand forward quick so he never loses
grip of the wire, and all the while bouncing up and down, up and down. Now my uncle tries to shout but
his words are noise and slobber because half his face is paralyzed. Now I see his fingers lose their grip
on the wire. Now I see him spin round and his hooked leg come free. Now he falls away, half his body
reaching, half his mouth screaming. I see him fall, I see him bounce from the rocks and cartwheel, a thing
I have always wished I could do. I see him go into the river and the brown water swallow him.

My older brother came out with a hook and a line and hauled me in. When my parents found I was not
shrieking, not a sob or a tear or even a pout, that was when they knew I was destined to become the
goddess. I was smiling in my wire cage.

***

I remember best the festivals, for it was only then that I left the Kumari Ghar. Dasain, at the end of
summer, was the greatest. For eight days the city ran red. On the final night I lay awake listening to the
voices in the square flow together into one roar, the way I imagined the sea would sound, the voices of
the men gambling for the luck of Lakshmi, devi of wealth. My father and uncles had gambled on the last
night of Dasain. I remember I came down and demanded to know what all the laughing was about and
they turned away from their cards and really laughed. I had not thought there could be so many coins in
the world as there were on that table but it was nothing compared to Kathmandu on the eighth of Dasain.
Smiling Kumarima told me it took some of the priests all year to earn back what they lost. Then came the
ninth day, the great day and I sailed out from my palace for the city to worship me.

I traveled on a litter carried by forty men strapped to bamboo poles as thick as my body. They went
gingerly, testing every step, for the streets were slippery. Surrounded by gods and priests and saddhus