"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 3 - Green Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

lived in the pines by the lake. Nirgal was afraid of her.

So like the others he concealed his dismay as the school door opened and the Bad Witch walked in. But
on this day she seemed tired, and let them out on time even though they had done poorly at arithmetic.
Nirgal followed Jackie and Dao out of the schoolhouse and around the corner, into the alley between
Creche Crescent and the back of the kitchen. Dao peed against the wall and Jackie pulled down her
pants to show she could too, and just then the Bad Witch came around the comer. She pulled them all
out of the alley by the arm, Nirgal and Jackie clutched together in one of her talons, and right out in the
plaza she spanked Jackie while shouting furiously at the boys. “You two stay away from her! She’s your
sister!” Jackie, crying and twisting to pull up her pants, saw Nirgal looking at her, and she tried to hit him
and Maya with the same furious swing, and fell over bare-bottomed and howled.



* * *



It wasn’t true that Jackie was their sister. There were twelve sansei or third-generation children in
Zygote, and they knew each other like brothers and sisters and many of them were, but not all. It was
confusing and seldom discussed. Jackie and Dao were the oldest, Nirgal a season younger, the rest
bunched a season after that: Rachel, Emily, Reull, Steve, Simud, Nanedi, Tiu, Frantz, and Huo Hsing.
Hiroko was mother to everyone in Zygote, but not really—only to Nirgal and Dao and six other of the
sansei, and several of the nisei grownups as well. Children of the mother goddess.

But Jackie was Esther’s daughter. Esther had moved away after a fight with Kasei, who was Jackie’s
father. Not many of them knew who their fathers were. Once Nirgal had been crawling over a dune after
a crab when Esther and Kasei had loomed overhead, Esther crying and Kasei shouting, “If you’re going
to leave me then leave!” He had been crying too. He had a pink stone eyetooth. He too was a child of
Hiroko’s; so Jackie was Hiroko’s granddaughter. That was how it worked. Jackie had long black hair
and was the fastest runner in Zygote, except for Peter. Nirgal could run the longest, and sometimes ran
around the lake three or four times in a row, just to do it, but Jackie was faster in the sprints. She laughed
all the time. If Nirgal ever argued with her she would say, “All right Uncle Nirgie,” and laugh at him. She
was his niece, although a season older. But not his sister.



The school door crashed open and there was Coyote, teacher for the day. Coyote traveled all over the
world, and spent very little time in Zygote. It was a big day when he taught them. He led them around the
village finding odd things to do, but all the time he made one of them read aloud, from books impossible
to understand, written by philosophers, who were dead people. Ba-kunin, Nietzsche, Mao,
Bookchin—these people’s comprehensible thoughts lay like unexpected pebbles on a long beach of
gibberish. The stories Coyote had them read from the Odyssey or the Bible were easier to understand,
though unsettling, as the people in them killed each other a lot and Hiroko said it was wrong. Coyote
laughed at Hiroko and he often howled for no obvious reason as they read these gruesome tales, and
asked them hard questions about what they had heard, and argued with them as if they knew what they
were talking about, which was disconcerting. “What would you do? Why would you do (hat?” All the
while teaching them how the Rickover’s fuel recycler worked, or making them check- the plunger
hydraulics on the lake’s wave machine, until their hands went from blue to white, and their teeth chattered
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html