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

through the records, through the eyewitness accounts, through the entire
burden of data only Rahvoli equations can handle—you come to a fulcrum.
A single event or act or person. It is like a decision tree with a thousand
thousand generations of decisions: Somewhere there was one first yes/no.
The place where the war started and where it could have been prevented.

"The great surprise of time rescue work has been how often that place
was female.

"Men fought wars, when there were wars. Men controlled the gold and
the weapons and the tariffs and sea rights and religions that have caused
wars, and the men controlled the bodies of other men who did the actual
fighting. But men are men. They acted at the fulcrum of history, but often
what tipped their actions one way or another was what they loved. A
woman. A child. She became the passive, powerless weight he chose to lift,
and the balance tipped. She, not he, is the branching place, where the
decision tree splits and the war begins."

The boy with the violet eyes was still watching her. Lambert stayed
silent until he turned to watch the squares—which was the reason he had
been brought here. Then she watched him. Anguished, passionate, able to
feel what war meant—he might be a good candidate for the time rescue
team when his preliminary studies were done. He reminded her a little of
Culhane.

Who right now, as project head, was interviewing the new hostage, not
lecturing to children.

Lambert stifled her jealousy. It was unworthy. And shortsighted: She
remembered what this glimpse of human misery had meant to her three
years ago, when she was an historian candidate. She had had nightmares
for weeks. She had thought the event was pivotal to her life, a dividing
point past which she would never be the same person again. How could
she? She had been shown the depths to which humanity, without the
Church of the Holy Hostage and the All-World Concordance, could
descend. Burning eye sockets, mutilated genitals, a general who stood on a
hill and said, "How I love to see the arms and legs fly!" It had been
shattering. She had been shattered, as the orientation intended she should
be.

The boy with the violet eyes was crying. Lambert wanted to step down
from the platform and go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him
and hold his head against her shoulder… but was that because of
compassion, or was that because of his violet eyes?

She said silently to him, without leaving the podium, you will be all
right. Human beings are not as mutable as you think. When this is over,
nothing permanent about you will have changed at all.