"Nancy Kress - The Battle of Long Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

The Battle of Long Island
by Nancy Kress
****
Over by the mess tent one of my younger nurses is standing close to a Special
Forces lieutenant. I watch her face tip up to his, her eyes wide and shining,
moonlight on her cheekbones. He reaches out one hand - his fingernails are not quite
clean - and touches her brown hair where it falls over her shoulder, and the light on
her skin trembles. I know that later tonight they will disappear into her tent, or his.
Later this week they will walk around the compound with their arms around each
other’s waists, sit across from each other at mess, and feed each other choice bits
of chow, oblivious to the amused glances of their friends. Later this month - or next
month, or the one after that, if this bizarre duty goes on long enough - she will be
pale and distraught, crumpling letters in one hand. She will cry in the supply tent. She
will tell the other nurses that he fed her lies. She will not hear orders, or will carry
them out red-eyed and wrong, endangering other lives and despising her own.
She will be useless to me, and I will transfer her out and start over with
another.
Or maybe it won’t happen that way. An alternate future: He will snap at his
buddies, volunteer for extra duty near the Hole, become careless with some red- or
homespun-coated soldier stumbling forward with a musket or bayonet. He’ll kill
somebody or - less likely - get killed himself. Or maybe he’ll just snap at the wrong
person - his captain, say. He’ll be transferred out. If he kills an Arrival, General
Robinson’s wife and daughters are members of the D.A.R.
The two people by the mess tent, of course, don’t see it this way. They like
the same movies, were snubbed by the same people in high school, voted the same
way in the last presidential election Both volunteered for duty by the Hole. It follows
that they’re in love. It follows that they understand each other, can see to the
bottoms of each others’s souls. The other military couples hey know - the ones who
have divorsed, or who haven’t the affairs on leave; the angry words on the parade
ground at dawn - have nothing to do with them. They are different. they are unique.
When people can see the truth so plain around them, why do they persist in
believing some other reality?
“Major Peters! You’re needed in Recovery! Quick!”
I leave my tent and tear across the compound at dead run. We have only three
people in Recovery; one of the weird laws of the Hole seems to be that they seldom
come through it if they’re going to recover. Musket balls in the belly or heart, shell
explosions that have torn off half a head. Eighty-three percent of the Arrivals are
dead a few minutes after they fall through the Hole. Another 11 percent live longer
but never regain consciousness. That leaves us with 6 percent who eventually talk,
although not to us. After we repair the flesh and boost the immune system, the Army
sends heavily armored trucks to move them out of our heavily armored compound
to somewhere else. The Pentagon? We aren’t told. Somewhere there are three
soldiers from Kichline’s Riflemen, a fieldgrade officer under Lord Percy, and a
shell-shocked corporal in homespun, all talking to the best minds the country thinks
it can find.
This time I want to talk first.
The soldier who has finally woken up is a grizzled veteran who came through
dressed in breeches, boots, and light coat. It’s summer on the other side of the Hole:
The Battle of Long Island was fought on August 27, 1776. Unlike most Arrivals, this
one staggered through the Hole without his rifle or bayonet, although he had a