"Resnick, Mike - Bibi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Then he fell into a restless sleep in which he was walking, walking, always walking. He was walking not merely across the millennia but across goddamned millions of years toward someone who had cried out in pain. Toward a _lot_ of someones. And he thought his heart would break from the effort and the sorrow.
* * *
Jeremy awoke, shivering, as three women sponged him down. A child's voice piped up like rock music when the lead singer goes falsetto. He heard a cuff, and a cry, and the child was out of there.
In the muted grey light of a dawn he had never expected to see, he found Elizabeth Umurungi's troubled eyes, much reddened, watching him. "If he doesn't come out of this now..." he expected her to say. Instead, he could lip-read the words of the Rosary.
He cried at her sorrow. He imagined that someone took his hand in a warm grip, unlike any he had ever known. It drew him back across the years, across the gulf of sickness, fear, and death, out of the place where the sky dropped diamonds and back into the familiar smells and sounds of the tiny village.
* * *
Flies buzzed overhead, butting up against the hut's thatched ceiling. Jeremy wrinkled his nose at the reek of antiseptic, so totally at odds with the homelier smells of animal dung, human sweat, and cooking fires. Not far away, water trickled into a metal basin... God, he was so thirsty! He tried to ask for water. Something between a croak and a whimper emerged from lips that cracked open with the effort.
Another voice echoed his. Someone went to the door and called. Shouts that might have been cheers sounded from outside.
"He's coming around? Good! Stay with him."
His eyes were so thoroughly gummed shut that it seemed to take an hour to open them. He flexed his fingers. Still all there. What about his other arm, the one Bibi had bitten?
Experimentally, he moved it, and flinched.
"I wouldn't try that," said Elizabeth. "You've been pretty sick. Bit of a reaction to the rabies vaccine. Or maybe the tetanus."
The _what?_
"Maybe you can help me out," continued Elizabeth. "I don't know what got you. I just know I found you, swelling up like a balloon, blood oozing from your arm, and nothing in sight."
"It was Bibi."
"Don't be ridiculous," said Elizabeth.
"It was Bibi, and she didn't do it to hurt me," whispered Jeremy weakly.
"Rubbish."
"You'll see," said Jeremy. "Ask her yourself."
"Why in the world would she come back here -- _especially_ if she bit you?"
"Because she's worried about her son."
"You're not her son," replied Elizabeth patiently, as if speaking to a child.
"We are _all_ her children," rasped Jeremy. "Somehow, she felt our pain, knew we were in trouble, and through means we'll never understand, she did what any mother would do: she came to help us."
"Jeremy, you've been delerious. You're still not thinking rationally," said Elizabeth. "She's an old woman, that's all. Possibly a bit retarded. And she's probably mute; the children told me she used some form of sign language when she spoke to them."
"She can speak," said Jeremy with absolute conviction. "It's just that no one can understand her language."
"Oh?" said Elizabeth sardonically. "Just what language does she speak?"
"I don't know," murmured Jeremy. "It hasn't been heard in three million years."
"You're sicker than I thought," she said as he passed out again.
* * *
When he awoke, he felt good.
More than good. He felt better than he'd felt in years. For the first time since he'd contracted the virus, he felt ready to get up and seize the day.
And then, suddenly, the revelation hit him. He tried to sit up, but found he didn't have the strength. A child looked in, saw him struggling, and called Elizabeth.
"What on earth is the matter with you, Jeremy?" she asked as she entered the hut.
"Nothing!" he said. "Absolutely nothing!"
She stared at him, puzzled.
"Don't you understand?" he said excitedly. _"There's nothing wrong with me!"_
"What are you talking about?"
"As soon as we get back to camp, I want you to run another blood test on me."
She looked at him as if she expected him to foam at the mouth momentarily. "You don't seriously believe that you're no longer HIV positive, do you?"
"Just test me," his voice reflecting his absolute conviction.
"There's never been a single recorded case of a spontaneous cure, Jeremy."
"It's _not_ spontaneous!" Jeremy said excitedly. "And no one records cures out here in the bush. _She_ cured me, just like she's cured so many others. That's what she's here for."
"And just how do you think this old, illiterate woman, who is totally ignorant of all medicine and technology, cured your incurable disease?"
"She bit me."
"You mean all I had to do all these months was bite you and you'd have become HIV negative?" said Elizabeth sarcastially.
"No. _She_ had to do it."
"She undoubtedly bit you because you scared her."
A feeling of overwhelming fatigue swept over him, and he lay back on his pillow. "I feel very sorry for you," he said.
"_You_ feel sorry for _me_?" she repeated. "Why?"
"Because you know too many facts and too little truth," he said as he struggled to remain awake. "You'll test my blood, and because you don't believe in Bibi, you'll take two or three more samples before you acknowledge what your tests tell you."