"The Little Goddess" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

I saw a flash of silver. The young man’s head flew up into the air. His mouth
and eyes went round: from a cry to an oh! The King’s Own machine had sheathed
its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in
the Hanumandhoka, realized it was dead and fell to the ground. The crowd
screamed and tried to get away from the headless thing. My bearers rocked,
swayed, uncertain where to go, what to do. For a moment I thought they might
drop me.
Smiling Kumarima let out little shrieks of horror, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” My face was
spotted with blood.
“It’s not hers,” Tall Kumarima shouted. “It’s not hers!” She moistened a
handkerchief with a lick of saliva. She was gently wiping the young man’s blood
from my face when the Royal security in their dark suits and glasses arrived,
beating through the crowd. They lifted me, stepped over the body and carried me
to the waiting car.
“You smudged my make-up,” I said to the Royal guard as the car swept away.
Worshippers barely made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.
Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters,
quartering the city for the plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the King’s
Own robots, that could fly and look down on Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk.
She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red and gold
embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.
“To help you sleep.”
I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.
“Who was he?”
“A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.”
“A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.”
“That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our kingdom has grown
too western, too far from its roots and religious truths.”
“And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but
the machine took his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to
the rain.”
Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took
out a second object which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care
as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light, fingerless glove, for the right
hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny
goat fetus.
“Do you know what this is?”
I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands
held up to snatch my image. A palmer.
“It sends messages into your head,” I whispered.
“That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but
this window opens onto the world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and
Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a thinking-thing, like the
machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly
and hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to
know. All you have to do is ask. And there are things you need to know, devi.
You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when you will leave your
palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.” She reached out
to take my face between her hands, then drew back. “You are special, my devi,
but the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the