"Jane M. Lindskold - Final Exam" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lindskold Jane)

Final Exam
Jane Lindskold
Jane Lindskold has both taken and given more final exams than she chooses to remember.
Her current life as a full-time writer frees her from this necessity. She is the author of many
novels, including Changer, Legends Walking, and Through Wolf's Eyes, and more than forty short
stories. "Final Exam" is her fourth story featuring the Albuquerque adepts.

IT'S not easy having your entire family think you're a goof off. Then again, easy isn't really what I
want or need. It's taken me—Danny Bancroft—a long time to learn that. Now that I have, though, I still
have a few ghosts to lay to rest.

I was born with Talent, raw Talent, gifts so strong that they killed my mother as I was being born. It
happened like this:
Prenatal me had a hole in one of the big arteries that feed the heart. When I was being born, the
strain tore open that hole. My heart pumped as hard as it could, but it wasn't enough. I was dying as I
was being born.
I remember it.
It felt like smothering. I'd never breathed, but that's what it felt like. I knew I couldn't get enough air.
For the first time ever, I started thinking—up till then, everything had been unfocused. I'd heard, felt,
moved, swam in the warm darkness, but I didn't really think. Now I did. They weren't brilliant thoughts,
more like emotion given construct. I was scared and I knew it!
That's when my Talent snapped into focus. That makes it sound like it was a separate part of me,
but it wasn't. My Talent is as much a part of me as an arm or a leg. Just like an arm or leg will catch you
when you're falling—sometimes even before you know you're falling—so my Talent reached out to catch
me.
It pulled those artery walls together, tried to suture them, to make them hold blood. But an infant
not yet born doesn't have much Power and that mending took more than I had to give. So my Talent
reached out and sucked. I was still connected to my mother then. I pulled the life right out of her and into
me.
I never knew my mother, but I sure knew when that warm comforting haven which had been my
world went away.
They tell me that it was a miracle I survived that strange labor, for my mother was dead before I
was born. The doctors had to do an emergency Caesarean, hauling me back out of the birth canal I'd
already slid partway down.
My mother's death certificate gives her cause of death as heart attack. It's true. I attacked her to
save my heart.

I grew up spoiled rotten.
Two years after I was born, my father married my mother's sister. Auntie Mom, as I called her, had
come to take care of me when her sister died. Pictures of her and my mom at the same age show them as
looking much alike. I guess it's not really surprising that my father fell in love with her.
Auntie Mom gave me at least as much love as she did her own children—my half brother and
sisters. Maybe she even gave me a bit more, to make up for the fact that I wasn't completely hers. My
dad lavished even more love on me, grateful that if fate had to take my mother, he hadn't lost me. I was
his miracle boy, his darling. He even called me his Cupid, because of how he and Auntie Mom had got
together.
 To me, all that love was a stolen sweet. I knew I didn't deserve it, because I never forgot that I had
killed my mother. I figured if they knew what I'd done, they'd stop loving me.
Despite this fear, unable to bear the guilt, I tried to tell them the truth, first when I was about three,
again when I was ten. They didn't understand. Another attempted confession, this one when I was fifteen,