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

Then Elizabeth walked up and down the row of children, studying each in turn. Finally she stopped before the tallest of the boys, who had long since outgrown his Michael Jordan t-shirt and was wearing a filthy, tattered Muhammed Ali t-shirt from another era.
"You know, don't you?" she said. "I can see it on your face. You know who took those things."
The boy's bare feet scuffed in the dust. He muttered something.
"I can't hear you," said Elizabeth.
"Bibi took them."
"His mother?" interjected Jeremy, puzzled.
"Perhaps," answered Elizabeth. "In formal Swahili, _bibi_ can also mean grandmother."
"You mean Maroka?" asked Jeremy, surprised.
There were indignant protests from the healthier of the two wives, who had come out to watch. From Maroka there was only a haughty lift of the head.
Elizabeth turned back to the child. "I want you to tell me where our things are. We can't go home without them."
More sidelong, wary glances, child to child.
Elizabeth left the boy and stopped in front of a girl who was no more than six or seven years old. She didn't say a word, just stared at her. The girl kicked the red dirt nervously with her bare feet and refused to meet Elizabeth's gaze.
"Do _you_ know?" Elizabeth finally asked her.
"_She_ said not to tell."
"Who said not to tell...and why?"
The little girl looked up, and then spoke in a rush. "Bibi. She says your hearts are good, because you wish to help. But she also says if we stayed in your village, we would have all gotten sicker. If we had left earlier, my father would still be alive."
"But that's not true!" protested Elizabeth.
"Bibi says it is," said the girl, staring unblinking into Elizabeth's eyes.
Elizabeth kept trying, but after a few minutes it became obvious that the children would not disobey Bibi and reveal where the missing parts were hidden.
Elizabeth exchanged a quick, frustrated glance with Jeremy. "Beautiful Uganda, land of my people, where no good deed goes unpunished," she murmured.
Jeremy was almost as depressed as he had been when the results of his initial bloodwork had come back. Radios, if mistreated, could be cranky, and there was a limit to the truck's ability to sit outside without maintenance. Let it be exceeded, and even if they found their equipment, they'd still be stranded in this tiny village.
"Well," said Elizabeth, "I may as well make my morning rounds." She grimaced in Jeremy's direction. "Are you ready for an _un_scientific opinion?"
"It's my favorite kind."
"Personally, I think this whole goddamned village needs to have its collective head examined."
The day passed uneventfully, and as the huge sun went down, Jeremy summoned the energy from somewhere to gather wood for a fire. The children were busy gathering firewood and water, and putting the chickens in their coops, which would be hung from nearby trees. Jeremy watched Elizabeth's friendly overtures met with polite coolness, as the villagers decided that black skin and a knowledge of Buganda did not make her one of them.
He considered the missing equipment for the hundredth time. They couldn't count on anyone arriving here except by accident. They _had_ to persuade the thief to give back the radio and the spark plugs.
Elizabeth emerged from a hut and walked over to join Jeremy. "I must have misdiagnosed that woman," she said, puzzled. "She showed all the classic signs, and I thought her fever would finish her off in a matter of hours. But she's no more an AIDS victim than _I_ am. Hell, even that case of thrush she had is clearing up." She shook her head. "Maroka wants to make her sit up tomorrow. I suppose she's right; the sooner she's back on her feet, the better."
"Who will watch her until she can go back out in the fields?"
Elizabeth shrugged. "We still haven't seen Bibi; given her age, that'd be a good job for her." She paused. "You know, that's another reason I'd like to get out of here; the poor thing's so scared of us she's hiding out in the bush. I didn't come here to turn some poor woman out of her house and put her at the mercy of the hyenas."
She seemed about to say something more, then changed her mind and headed off to her sleeping hut.
Darkness descended, and Jeremy soon fell asleep on the back of the truck. When he woke in the morning, the crimson ribbon was missing from his shirt.
_Interesting_. He climbed down, swallowed his pills, cut himself a fresh ribbon, and put the much-diminished spool into a hip pocket, just in case.
And suddenly he _knew_ that he was being watched. He found himself glancing over his shoulder, watching the long sharp shadows in case some tiny fragment broke off from one of them and headed for the truck or the fields or the deep bush.
When he paused to wipe his face after splashing it with some water, the sense of being watched grew even stronger. Once or twice, he caught a flicker of motion on the far side of a clearing, at the edge of his vision.
Maroka's _bibi_? He hadn't gotten a good look at her, but he couldn't imagine who else it could be. He set off across the clearing, and soon spotted some footprints in the dust. They were small enough to be the prints of a child, but they were deep, as if the person they belonged to was carrying something heavy.
They led him deeper and deeper into the bush. Soon the vegetation had closed around him. He could hear the chirping of birds and the buzzing of insects, but the only motion he could see was the slight swaying of leaves in the hot breeze. He could almost imagine that he was some stone-age man, pushing his way through the bush in pursuit of his dinner; surely the terrain hadn't looked much different even a million years ago.
A hyena giggled in the distance; in Jeremy's mind it became a 300-pound hyenadon. A vulture circled lazily overhead; he pretended it was a pteradactyl.
He was still imagining a distant past and a more physically imposing version of himself when suddenly he came upon a clearing. A huge dead tree had fallen down -- he imagined that a mastodon had pushed it over -- and a nearby termite mound towered some twenty feet above the ground.
Then, suddenly, he became aware of a cluster of children, and saw the baby -- (and how had they let the kids take it out of the hut?) -- in the arms of what looked like another child.
That is, it looked like another child until he got a glimpse of its wizened face. It was a female, no question about it, for she was nursing the infant. Her skin seemed incredibly ancient, not so much lined as engraved with seams. The sparse hair surrounding it, growing far down on her low brow, was white. But the smile on her lips as she looked down at the baby was very beautiful and oddly familiar.
_I've seen you before, I know I have. But where?_
Jeremy took a step toward her. A dry twig snapped beneath his foot and a dozen birds burst from cover while overhead a family of colobus monkeys began shrieking. The woman with the ancient face jumped, startled. Then she laid the baby down on a piece of red cloth and fled into the bush. The infant, deprived of his milk, promptly began howling.
_"Come on, Bibi!" he wanted to yell after her. "Can a sick, skinny American be that frightening?"_
By the time Jeremy had helped soothe the infant, placing it in the eldest girl's arms and coaxing all of them to believe he wasn't some sort of monster just because the old woman had fled, he had gotten his thoughts -- and his memory -- in order.
One summer, just for a change, he had rented a place on Nantucket, not the Hamptons: a shabby, ramshackle, desirable home that had cost him a bundle. It had been a good summer, and he hadn't begrudged a cent of it, despite about a week of rainy days. Along with the seafood, the sailing, and the whale watching, he'd had the whole old house to prowl through. And, in its attic, he'd found treasure indeed -- thirty years worth of _National Geographics_.
He'd loved that magazine ever since he was a child. In fact, he'd dreamed of being an explorer, maybe even a paleontologist or geochronologist until his Uncle Sid -- the executive vice president -- sat him down and explained the facts of life to him: student loans; grants; bottom lines. The best way -- probably the _only_ way -- to participate in these expeditions was to fund them.
So he'd packed the dream away, but he'd kept up his subscription to _National Geographic_, joined the Nature Conservancy, and always made donations to the American Museum of Natural History. They were good causes and tax-deductible, but the _real_ reason was that he loved them.
Now, those yellowed covers and fragile pages riffled in his imagination, and he remembered Dr. Donald Johanson's discovery of _Australopithecus afarensis_, some 3.2 million years old. She was mankind's ancestor, a tiny female Johanson had called Lucy after the Beatles' record his staff had played incessantly during the dig.
And now he had seen her. Not as a mummified corpse or a pile of white bones, either.
He'd seen her as a living, breathing being. Nursing her great-to-the-Nth-power-grandchild. He even knew her name.