"Liz Williams - Empire of Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

behind them were the peaks of the mountain-parks. The air was summer-warm and fragrant with pollen,
but clouds were massing over the coast. There was a snap of lightning as the weather systems harnessed
the monsoon; there would be rain before morning. Sirru was sud-denly glad that he was here at home
and not on some primi-tive alien world, surrounded by unforeseen horrors. His quills rose and shivered,
despite the warmth of the night.

But what could be going so badly wrong on Arakrahali? Worlds were colonized all the time by the
various castes under whose aegis they fell. That was the whole purpose of irRas so-ciety, the drive which
impelled them as a people. From an-cient times they had seeded worlds; kept a distant but kindly eye
upon them as they evolved, then stepped in when the time was right to shape the inhabitants to proper
specifications and bring them into the fold of the irRas' huge biological empire. Granted, Sirru thought,
this was not always a simple matter. Colonies occasionally had to be terminated if their populations had
degenerated past a certain point, but that was part of the natural order, just as gardens needed to be
pruned and weeded before the plants within them could reach fruition. Did not the oldest texts describe
the galaxy itself as just an-other garden? And were not the irRas the only intelligent form of life in all that
sea of stars? As such, they surely had a responsibility to generate new phenotypes, and to bring all
people beneath their benevolent rule.

Moreover, Arakrahali had seemed such a quiet little world, with an industrious population that had
bypassed the excesses indulged in by some cultures. The planet had not had a war for generations and
the system of land ownership entailed that no one was starving. Arakrahali, IrEthiverris had confidently
declared at the beginning of his colonial appointment, would be like a stroll in the park.

Yet now it was all going wrong. Sirru shivered. Verris had been a friend all his life—they'd practically
come out of the same tank together—and Sirru knew how competent and conscientious the man was.
He'd never seen IrEthiverris pan-icking. In the morning, he would try and find out what was going on.
Nothing could be done about it now, but Sirru was too worried to sleep. He made his way down into the
gardens, pushing his way through the dense and fragrant growth of pillar-vine and inchin, until he reached
the irrigation pools. There he sat, in the quiet summer darkness, waiting for the storm to break.

THE CONJUROR'S DAUGHTER

i

Varanasi/ India/ 2o30

/ «y«/ to be a goddess. Not that that's much use to me right *'tnow, Jaya thought as she stood angrily
in the hospital corridor. Catching a glimpse of herself in a laminated dis-play cabinet, she had to stifle a
smile at the notion of deity. They'd issued her with a shapeless nylon gown; she g looked small and bent
and old, somehow out of place in this gleaming new ward. She gripped the edge of the cabinet to steady
herself.

"Mrs. Nihalani," Erica Fraser said, with barely concealed impatience. "This is the fourth time this week!
Whatever are we going to do with you?"

"I want to leave." Jaya tried to sound calm, but her gnarled hand shook as it clasped the edges of the
cabinet. She could feel her body trembling. "I'm not a prisoner here." That was true enough; this was
nothing like jail in Delhi, nothing like Tihar. "Well, I'm afraid you can't. You're in no condition to go
wandering off. And where would you go? When we found you, you were living on a waste dump. You're
crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. Mrs. Nihalani, we're only trying to help."