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

world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than that, even . . .”
She banished the emotion by gently fitting the fetus-shaped receiver behind my
ear. I felt the plastic move against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the
glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her voice inside my head. Glowing
words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly taught to
read by Tall Kumarima.
Don’t let anyone find it, her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling
Kumarima. I know you call her that, but she would not understand. She would
think it was unclean, a pollution. In some ways, she is not so different from
that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret, just you and me.
Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas, but I
pretended to be asleep. The glove and the fetus-thing were hidden under my
pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the goose down and soft soft
cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the
night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and
earhook and went looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty
kilometers up, through the eye of a weather aeai spinning over east India. I saw
the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea. There
had been cats in the village; suspicious things lean on mice and barley. No cat
was permitted in the Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my kingdom but I could not
see a city or a palace or me down here at all. I saw mountains, white mountains
ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart went out of
me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that
hung beneath it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and
their brilliant cities and their bright nations. India, where our gods and names
were born.
Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The
clouds were low over Kathmandu. The color ran from the temples in Durbar Square
but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the
Taleju Devi.
“What will happen to them?” I asked Tall Kumarima. “The bad men.”
“They will likely be hanged,” she said.
That autumn after the executions of the traitors the dissatisfaction finally
poured on to the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police
and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good
with our Kingdom and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to
explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned
elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jeweled skirt.
In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history,
by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire.
My kingdom had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India
from the Last Empire—men like gods—and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and
intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States
of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.
Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais
haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to
one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and
men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by
their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the
aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that