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

All at once the water in the pond gave a small hiccup and sloshed
gently onto the sandy beach.

“Did you feel that?” Sudie said. “The ground moved!”

“Ground can’t move,” Li said, because he was the leader. But it had.
He waited for the ground to do something else but it just lay there, ground
under water. Li got out of the pond.

“Where are you going?” Jana said.

“Feeder time,” Li said, although it wasn’t.

They pulled Kim to her feet and ran. By the time they reached the
Grove, their naked bodies were dry. Li could feel his hair, which Taney
sometimes cut, curling wetly on the back of his neck. Jana’s hair, shorter
than his, stood up in yellow fluff that Li liked. Maybe Jana would want to play
bodies with him tonight.

They sat in a circle under the trees, hungry and pleasantly tired from
splashing in the pond. Sudie studied the keypad under the screen, each
button with a little picture on it, and chose the cartoon about four children
helping each other to make sand paintings. Li was tired of that cartoon,
although when it first appeared, they’d all loved it. Days and days had been
spent making sand paintings with the many-colored sands on the beach by
the pond.

The cartoon played, but only Kim really watched it. The feeder rose
and—

“The bowls are empty!” Jana cried.

Li leaped up and examined the four wooden bowls. Empty. How
could that be? Why would the feeder bring empty bowls?

The ground moved gently beneath them.

“The feeder is broken!” Sudie jumped up and ran to the keypad. Each
of its buttons had a picture of a cartoon showing the right thing to do for
eating, for playing, for cleaning themselves, for fixing bloody scratches if
they fell, for not using up all their kindness if they got angry with each other.
But nothing for a broken feeder, a thing that couldn’t happen because the
feeder was part of the world. But if there was an inside to the covering that
was the world and therefore an outside then maybe—Li had never thought
this before—maybe the feeder, like Taney, went outside and things could
break there?

Cold slid along Li’s neck. Kim started licking everyone’s face, running
from one to another. Li let her because Kim was stronger than he was and
anyway he was used to it.