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

crowd of whores had burst into the palace where she was supping,
demanding Nan Bullen, who they said was one of them. She had escaped
across the Thames in a barge, and not a cry had escaped her lips. They
had admired her for her courage: Wyatt, Norris, Weston, Henry himself.
She would not scream now.

The box of light grew larger as it approached. She had just time to say
to it, "I have been God's faithful and true servant, and my husband, the
king's," before it was upon her.


"The place where a war starts," Lambert said to the faces assembled
below her in the Hall of Time, "is long before the first missile, or the first
bullet, or the first spear."

She looked down at the faces. It was part of her responsibility as an
intern researcher to teach a class of young, some of whom would become
historians. The class was always taught in the Hall of Time. The expense
was enormous: keeping the hall in stasis for nearly an hour, bringing the
students in through the force field, activating all the squares at once. Her
lecture would be replayed for them later, when they could pay attention to
it. Lambert did not blame them for barely glancing at her now. Why
should they? The walls of the circular room, which were only there in a
virtual sense, were lined with squares that were not really there at all. The
squares showed actual, local-time scenes from wars that had been there,
were there now, somewhere, in someone's reality.

Men died writhing in the mud, arrows through intestines and neck and
groin, at Agincourt.

Women lay flung across the bloody bodies of their children at
Cawnpore.

In the hot sun the flies crawled thick upon the split faces of the heroes
of Marathon.

Figures staggered, their faces burned off, away from Hiroshima.

Breathing bodies, their perfect faces untouched and their brains turned
to mush by spekaline, sat in orderly rows under the ripped dome on
Io-One.

Only one face turned toward Lambert, jerked as if on a string, a boy
with wide violet eyes brimming with anguish. Lambert obligingly started
again.

"The place where a war starts is long before the first missile, or the first
bullet, or the first spear. There are always many forces causing a war:
economic, political, religious, cultural. Nonetheless, it is the great
historical discovery of our time that if you trace each of these back—