"Vonda N. McIntyre-Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

 The youth muttered incomprehensibly and flailed at the keeper's hand so the nearly empty bowl
clattered across the Stone paving. The keeper sat back on his heels, but the youth was asleep again.
After a little while, the keeper lay down on the pallet again and opened his good wing. He slid his hand
across the youth's chest, slowly, gently, following sharp lines of ribs, soft skin. The youth shifted.
Suddenly guilty, the keeper clenched his touching-fingers into a fist, and lay rigid.
***


Among the auroras, one day was indistinguishable from the next. The curtains of light screened out the
sun and brightened the darkness. Without darkness or light as a rough guide, the keeper had no idea how
long the youth slept. He only knew that his time became more difficult. He could not avoid touching the
youth, who needed to be fed and kept warm and clean, and whose wing's tendons and muscles would
contract without massage. He worked hard over the youth, trying to ignore his feelings, trying to control
them.
Yet, who would know if he drew his hands along the thin body, half-extended the short silver talons,
drew narrow lines of love against the skin? He could embrace the sleeper, extending both his wings, and
no one would pull away at the rough contact of tattered webbing. Children fondled and explored each
other's androgynous genitals-- why should he restrain himself? Whispered words might influence a
decision yet to be made, words and the persuasion of experienced hands, even through sleep. And if the
youth awakened, what right could anyone so ugly have to object? Who else but a cripple would take
such a mate? Who was left to care?
He opened his eyes against his fantasies, and felt ashamed. The auroras-- his pride, his prison--
throbbed just beyond the low stone wall.
When he felt most cynical and most alone, he sometimes calmed himself with assurances that he was
the most worthy of his people, strong enough (for was he not alive?) to afford kindness and even mercy.
Yet of the few crimes his people recognized, the action he contemplated now was the worst.
He had been lonely for a long time. He had understood his solitude, but never accepted it. He was a
proud thing, despite his wounds. He might have been bitter and cruel, or vain and futile, but he had even
been too proud for that, too proud to allow despair to change him even when there was no one left to
see. Now he began to fear that his strength and pride were near exhausted. Attracted, despite the
ugliness of the pastel eyes, the keeper could feel himself falling in love. He forced himself to begin thinking
of the youth in the masculine. When the youth... when he awoke, that could be even more influencing
than treating him as sexed while he was asleep, but his awakening would force the keeper away from his
fantasies.
And perhaps the youth would approach him, in the way that was right and proper, and then the
fantasies would no longer be needed.
***


He knew the bones had knit, well or badly, when the youth's temperature sank toward normal even
while he covered him. He folded his wing and rolled away, unwilling to be so near when the youth
awoke. He got up, slowly, and limped into the temple.
Later, finishing his duties before the ancient altar, he heard a stirring outside.
The youth, awake, was pulling at the splint. The keeper squatted down beside him and pushed his
hand away.
"I'm healed, aren't I? Or I wouldn't have woken up."
The keeper, in his fantasies, had forgotten or discounted the youth's hostility; he was taken aback by it
now. "I hope that thou art healed," he said evenly. He removed the splint and gently stretched the wing.
The web was soft, and cool. It was almost as hard to take his hands away, even though the youth was
awake. The line of the bone was clean, sharp under skin, light. The bone was unscarred, still hollow.