"Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

"I believe that war is too imperfect for a perfect master."
Again that steady regard. She ran a small white finger slowly back and forth along her saber's
sheath, thinking. Then she nodded. "You are intelligent — but are you cruel? You wouldn't hurt me,
would you? Use intelligence against me, who am only a girl, and pretty?"
"I think... you would be difficult to injure."
She grinned, was up off my cot, bent and kissed my forehead, then sat back down again. She'd
smelled of cool air, and nothing else.
"Let's tell our stories — but only the truth; it's too early for lies. Yes? May I call you NP? Short for
Neckless Peter?"
 "I suppose so. And I suppose I must call you... Impatience."
"I like that. My Uncle Niles would agree it was just."
"Your Uncle Niles... ?"
"Ah, you want my story first."
"Why not?"
"Hmmm." She sat at ease, thinking... her smooth, oval, nearly childish face changing in swift
reflection of the memories she was choosing. Her face seemed to me not an ambassador's — an
ambassadress's — but an emissary's, perhaps.
"... Well, I was born to a fine family, only slightly beneath the finest. Cambridge-born in Boston
Township. I was taught the past and present. I read and write and configure the mathematics... within
reason."
"Within what reason, Impatience?"
"Within the quadratics, but not fluxions."
"Do you have Newton's work? The mathematician, I mean, not the dead River King."
She smiled at me. "Why, NP, you just came to life!"
"Do you have it — and original, complete?"
"No. We, like all the world, are only copybook people, though there are rumors of a great library
where the ancient campus was, by old Harvard Yard."
"Under the ice...."
"Under a mile of ice." She toyed with her saber. "Someday... someday, since you will be my friend,
perhaps you could come to Boston, help us excavate, search for it. Someday perhaps become librarian
for those endless shelves of Warm-time books, waiting now in cold and darkness with all their secrets."
"Secrets...."
"The secret of flying to the moon. The secret of the so-tiny bad things that make sickness happen —
though Boston already knows some of that secret. The secrets of waves of radio, of black
boom-powder..." She leaned closer. "NP, the pupils of your eyes just changed the littlest bit! Have you
been naughty?"
"I don't — "
"Have you found... could you have found, in the Great Khan's fine library, the making-means of
boom-powder?"
"No."
"No?" The predatory attention of a teasing child. "You didn't discover the method mentioned —
perhaps unbind the book to take that page away and write another in its place? .... Then burned that
taken-away page?"
"No." This 'no' spoken, I believe, fairly convincingly.
"Well, I won't mention even the possibility to the Captain-General or his officers. I'm afraid of what
they might do to such a little old man, to have that secret out of him."
"I know no such secret."
"Well, of course I believe you. I believe you, NP — though Boston suspects that several scholars,
over the centuries, have found the making-means of boom-powder... then burned those pages, rather
than accomplish even more mischief in a mischievous world, than sharp steel has done."