"Stars - 01 - Four Hundred Billion Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

wrote on the glass and pressed a switch: a slot unreeled a little tongue of
paper. Seyoura Yep tore it off and said, "Show this to your parents. And don't
do it again. All right?"
Dorthy took the paper and looked at her teacher, who told her to run along. As
the door slid shut behind her, Dorthy heard Seyoura Yep say flatly, "These Nips.
Still living the Age of Waste, most of them. They're almost as bad as the
Yanks."
After Dorthy's father had read the note, he unbuckled his belt and formally beat
Dorthy three times across the bottom. But it didn't hurt very much and it was
worth it, really, because after that Suzi left her alone. Dorthy forgot all
about the picture that had come from nowhere until the second time her Talent
manifested itself, two years later.
The second time began with a dream.
One of the children in the apt complex, a boy not much older than Dorthy, had
disappeared. His parents went from door to door asking about him and then two of
the yard police came and made a lot of noise as they looked in all the apts: but
they didn't find the boy either. The next day the grown-ups forbade their
children to play outside. The women called to each other like startled birds,
asking after the latest news, and the men squatted in little groups in corners
of the walkways, over a go board or a shared bottle, talking in low voices. It
was midwinter, the end of June, a traditional time of unrest in the town.
The whale herds were trawling the oceans half a world away, and the flensing
yard, almost the whole town, was closed. Everyone in the apt complex feared that
the boy's disappearance was an early symptom of yet another pogrom against the
Japanese. Many remembered the last, not twenty years before, and the relatives
they had lost in it.
That night Dorthy had her dream, although she didn't remember it as such. She
found herself standing beside her parents' sleeping mat in cool darkness, her
head swollen with a blinding headache, her mouth thick with a blubbery taste.
Memory of the words she had spoken as she had jerked out of her trance was like
an echo in her brain.
The old vats in the yard!
It was a measure of the community's anxiety that this slender and unlikely clue
was taken seriously. A party of men broke into the yard. Most were chased out by
the police, but two found the lost boy huddled in a corner of the disused
storage tank into which he had fallen, the hatch an unreachable two metres above
his head.
That night, Uncle Mishio came around to discuss what should be done: he alone of
Dorthy's father's family was still on speaking terms. Dorthy listened to their
voices, a rising and falling cadence interspersed with the chink of china upon
china, as she lay in her parents' bedroom, where she had slept fitfully all day.
She felt hot and cold again, felt once more a hopeless undefined guilt.
The voices went on, and at last she fell asleep. When her father woke her, the
room was filled with grey dawn light. He was grinning widely and reeked of rice
wine, and Dorthy began to cry in confusion because she had been sure that she
was going to be punished.
Her father wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "You may be
something special, daughter. Understand me? Tomorrow we go to a place in Darwin
to see."
Her Uncle Mishio clapped a hand on her father's shoulder, his seamed face