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

“Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?”

Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat
back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.

“I know how happy we are all here, but change must always happen. Change in the world, like this
snow—unnatural, devi, not right—change in our city. And we are not immune to it in here, my flower.
Change will come to you, devi. To you, to your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would
stop it happening to you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay. Take
these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can all be happy here together,
devi.” She looked up from her deferential half-bow, into my eyes. She smiled. “Have I ever wanted
anything but the best for you?”

I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my fist and slipped from my
carved throne. As I went to my room, I could hear Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to
the goddesses in the carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong color. Then I
filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down, down.

After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing as miraculously on my
bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima, even when she commented on how fractious
I was becoming, how strangely inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in
the walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have called my disorder, that
that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the
least odor and the people in my courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went
for weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with old blood. With
the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical battlefield between my own hormones
and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants. It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and
bloated in the heat, a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the
little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.

I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell, like the pills had made me feel, it
was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body. I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing
longer. I became very very aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to
me.

At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me, but I didn’t. I was
scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.

Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the floorboards but it was
Smiling Kumarima drew back in the corridor as we hurried towards the darshan hall, hesitated a
moment, said, softly, smiling as always,

“How you’re growing, devi. Are you still. . . ? No, forgive me, of course. . . . Must be this warm
weather we’re having, makes children shoot up like weeds. My own are bursting out of everything they
own, nothing will fit them.”

The next morning as I was dressing a tap came on my door, like the scratch of a mouse or the click of an
insect.