"Nancy Kress - Safeguard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

SAFEGUARD
by Nancy Kress

Four innocent children may hold the key to our survival, or total
annihilation, in this powerful and riveting new tale.

****

The uniformed military aide appeared at her elbow just as Katherine
Taney rose from her gilded chair to enter the Oval Office. “The president
will see you now,” his secretary said simultaneously with the aide’s
statement, “Wait a moment, Katie.”

She turned to stare at him. Keep the president waiting? But his face
told. For a moment vertigo nearly took her, a swooping blackness, but
only for a moment. She said quietly to the aide, “Another one?”

“Two more. Possibly three.”

Dear God.

“Ma’am,” chided the secretary, “the president is ready.”

She straightened her aging back, thought a quick prayer, and went
to brief the commander-in-chief. No, not really to brief—to plead, with the
war-battered United States government, for compassion in the face of the
unthinkable.

****

In the beginning, Li remembered, there had been big faceless
people, white as cartoons. These memories were quick and slippery, like
dreams. The other children didn’t have them at all. Since that time, there
had been only the real cartoons, the world, and Taney.

He had realized a long time ago that Taney was a person inside a
white cartoon covering, and that he himself was a person inside the world,
another covering. The world must also have an outside because when
Taney left after each visit, she couldn’t have stayed for days in the space
behind the leaving door. The space was too small, not even room to lie
down to sleep. And what would she eat or drink in there until she came
back? And where did she get the fried cakes and other things she brought
them?
 “There’s another door, isn’t there, Taney?” he said yet again as the
five of them sat around the feeder in the Grove. The feeder had just
brought up bowls of food, but no one except Sudie was eating them
because Taney had brought a lot of fried cakes in a white bag. Sudie,
always greedy, had eaten three fried cakes and half a bowl of stew and now
slumped happily against a palm tree, her naked belly round and her lips
greasy. Jana sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her thin arms clasped