"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bones of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

The man nodded and went back in his room. He emerged in less
than a minute. “It is coming,” he said. “Let me help you out.”
“I don’t think I can walk,” said Lynn. She was terrified and, to
her horror, began to cry.
The man, though the hair on his broad chest was white, bent
down and picked her up as easily as if she were a child. Lynn looked
up and down the hall as she tried not to think about what was
happening, what must have already happened, to her.
“Where is the boy?” she asked.
“What boy?” the man said.
“There was a boy here.”
The man’s stride was long and swift, and the scream of the
ambulance grew. They were only a few blocks from Kapiolani
Women’s Hospital, where the baby was to have been born.
“Must have been a neighbor boy,” he said. He laid her on the
stretcher and she felt the cool, soothing sensor that monitored vital
signs touch the back of her neck. The man left without another
word.
 As they pulled away the medic put an oxygen mask over Lynn’s
face, but she knew it was too late for anything that would help.
Against the loss of her fetus, whose name, at two months, had
been Masa Elizabeth Oshima, who had been on the waiting list
already at the exclusive Rainbow Keiki School, Lynn held the face of
the golden boy steady as a long note of music. Like water in a swift
stream her other future rushed away, the one where she magically
changed from a Type A to a Type B personality, composed
synthesizer masterpieces, raised Masa, and lived off the money she
got from her dead mother’s genescan patent—plus the sale of her
Interspace shares when she completely and finally, bravely divorced
herself from that corruption-riddled institution.
Yes. With the shot of pure oxygen to her brain Lynn knew without
a doubt who that boy was. His picture had burned into her years
ago and had remained all this time.
She knew he would probably be dead soon, just as the others like
him were dead. Dead like Masa. A wasted child, a wasted life.
She turned her head aside and felt the tears burn.




2

The old bamboo blinds buzzed in the night wind as Lynn kicked
back in her chair, propped her legs on her desk, and bent over the
pale screen of her small handy. She heard Nana shuffle toward her
half-opened bedroom door past the faded old prints of Himage
Island. Nana’s father had brought them from Japan when he came,
a laborer, in the 1930s, his picture-bride following a year later.
Nana stood in the doorway, tiny and stern. She would tell no one
how old she was, but Lynn and her brothers had her pegged at