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

you call her that, but she would not understand. She would think it was unclean, a pollution. In
some ways, she is not so different from that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret,
just you and me.

Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas, but I pretended to be asleep.
The glove and the fetus-thing were hidden under my pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the
goose down and soft soft cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the
night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and earhook and went
looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty kilometers up, through the eye of a weather aeai
spinning over east India. I saw the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea.
There had been cats in the village; suspicious things lean on mice and barley. No cat was permitted in the
Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my kingdom but I could not see a city or a palace or me down here at
all. I saw mountains, white mountains ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart
went out of me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that hung beneath
it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and their brilliant cities and their bright nations.
India, where our gods and names were born.

Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The clouds were low over
Kathmandu. The color ran from the temples in Durbar Square but people beat tins and metal cups in the
muddy streets calling praise on the Taleju Devi.

“What will happen to them?” I asked Tall Kumarima. “The bad men.”

“They will likely be hanged,” she said.

That autumn after the executions of the traitors the dissatisfaction finally poured on to the streets like
sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the
symbol of all that was good with our Kingdom and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to
explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned elsewhere, to the huge,
old land to the south, spread out like a jeweled skirt. In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the
terrifying depth of its history, by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after
empire. My kingdom had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India from the
Last Empire—men like gods—and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and intrigue and corruption into
feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.

Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais haunted the crowded streets
like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to one. There the old distinctions were abandoned
and women married as far up and men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as
enthralled by their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the aeai-generated soaps
they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that early, hard winter when the police and King’s
machines restored the old order to the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens.
One day I woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square heavy with
it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange weather was not my doing but the result
of huge, slow changes in the climate. Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes
thick and soft as ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together inside
the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.

“Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?”

I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.