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

made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.

Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters, quartering the city for the
plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the King’s Own robots, that could fly and look down on
Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk. She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red
and gold embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.

“To help you sleep.”

I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.
“Who was he?”

“A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.”

“A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.”

“That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our kingdom has grown too western, too far from
its roots and religious truths.”

“And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but the machine took
his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to the rain.”

Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took out a second object
which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light,
fingerless glove, for the right hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny
goat fetus.

“Do you know what this is?”

I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands held up to snatch my
image. A palmer.

“It sends messages into your head,” I whispered.

“That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but this window opens onto the
world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a
thinking-thing, like the machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly and
hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to know. All you have to do is ask.
And there are things you need to know, devi. You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when
you will leave your palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.” She reached out to
take my face between her hands, then drew back. “You are special, my devi, but the kind of special it
takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than
that, even . . .”

She banished the emotion by gently fitting the fetus-shaped receiver behind my ear. I felt the plastic move
against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her
voice inside my head. Glowing words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly
taught to read by Tall Kumarima.

Don’t let anyone find it, her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling Kumarima. I know