"Nancy Kress - And Wild for to Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

made no move. He had even seemed to take the baby's sex well: "She
seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good
shape." But Anne knew. She always knew. She had known when Henry's
eye first fell upon her. Had known to a shade the exact intensity of his
longing during the nine years she had kept him waiting: nine years of
celibacy, of denial. She had known the exact moment when that hard
mind behind the small blue eyes had decided: It is worth it. I will divorce
Katherine and make her queen. Anne had known before he did when he
decided it had all been a mistake. The price for making her queen had
been too high. She was not worth it. Unless she gave him a son.

And if she did not…

In the darkness Anne squeezed her eyes shut. This was but an attack of
childbed vapors; it signified nothing. She was never afraid, not she. This
was only a night terror, and when she opened her eyes it would pass,
because it must. She must go on fighting, must get herself heavy with a
son, must safeguard her crown. And her daughter. There was no one else
to do it for her, and there was no way out.

When she opened her eyes a demon, shaped like a square of light,
glowed in the corner of the curtained bedchamber.


Lambert dipped her head respectfully as the high priest passed.

She was tall and wore no external augments. Eyes, arms, ears, shaved
head, legs under the gray-green ceremonial robe—all were her own, as
required by the charter of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Lambert had
heard a rumor that before her election to high priest she had had brilliant,
violet-augmented eyes and gamma-strength arms, but on her election had
had both removed and the originals restored. The free representative of all
the hostages in the solar system could not walk around enjoying
high-maintenance augments. Hostages could, of course, but the person in
charge of their spiritual and material welfare must appear human to any
hostage she chose to visit. A four-handed spacer held in a free-fall
chamber on Mars must find the high priest as human as did a genetically
altered flier of Ipsu being held hostage by the New Trien Republic. The
only way to do that was to forego external augments.

Internals, of course, were a different thing.

Beside the high priest walked the director of the Time Research
Institute, Toshio Brill. No ban on externals for him: Brill wore gold-plated
sensors in his shaved black head, a display Lambert found slightly
ostentatious. Also puzzling: Brill was not ordinarily a flamboyant man.
Perhaps he was differentiating himself from Her Holiness. Behind Brill his
project heads, including Culhane, stood silent, not speaking unless spoken
to. Culhane looked nervous: He was ambitious, Lambert knew. She
sometimes wondered why she was not.