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

around her legs. Kim stared at nothing.

Li repeated, “Another door. You go out of the world through another
door, don’t you?”

“I can’t answer that,” Taney said, as always. The girls didn’t even
glance at her. Li didn’t expect them to; he was the only one who ever
questioned Taney.

But tonight Jana, still gazing over her clasped knees at the shadow of
trees against the sky, said, “Why can’t you answer, Taney?”

Taney’s head swiveled toward Jana. It was hard to see Taney’s eyes
through the faceplate on her white covering; you had to get very close and
squint. The cartoons covered like Taney didn’t even have eyes, no matter
how much you squinted at them.

There hadn’t been any new cartoons for a long while.

Taney finally said, “I can’t answer you, Jana, because the world keeps
you safe.”

The old answer, the one they’d heard all their lives from Taney, from
the cartoons. For the first time, Li challenged it. “How, Taney? How does
the world keep us safe? Sudie still fell over that stone and you had to come
and fix her arm. Jana ate that flower and all her food came out of her
mouth.” The next day, all of that kind of flower, all over the world, had
disappeared.

Taney merely repeated, “The world keeps you safe.”

Sudie said suddenly from her place against the tree, “Your voice is
sad, Taney.”

Jana said, “When will we get new cartoons?”
 But Taney was already getting to her feet, slow and heavy in her white
covering. Even Kim knew what that meant. Kim climbed onto Taney’s lap
and started to lick frantically at Taney’s face, and it took both Sudie and Li
to pull her back. Kim was tall and strong. Taney said, as always, “Be well,
dear hearts,” and started away.

Li, clutching the screaming Kim, watched Taney walk the path
between the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. The leaving door was
in a big pink rock at the small end of the world, near the pond. Maybe
tomorrow they would splash in the pond. That might be fun.

Except that nothing was as much fun as it used to be. Li didn’t know
why, but it was true.

Eventually Kim stopped screaming and they let her go. Jana folded