"06 - Children of the Mind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

was going to change the course of history! Clean out the corruption in the
Congress. Stop the Lusitania Fleet. Make all colony planets equal members
of the Hundred Worlds. This boy who stretched like a jungle cat.

"I don't have your approval," he said. He sounded annoyed and amused, both
at once. But then she might not be good at understanding the inflections of
one such as this. Certainly it was hard to read the grimaces of such a
round-eyed man. Both his face and his voice contained hidden languages that
she could not understand.

"You must understand," he said. "I'm not myself."

Wang-mu spoke the common language well enough at least to understand the
idiom. "You are unwell today?" But she knew even as she said it that he had
not meant the expression idiomatically at all.

"I'm not myself," he said again. "I'm not really Peter Wiggin."

"I hope not," said Wang-mu. "I read about his funeral in school."

"I do look like him, though, don't I?" He brought up a hologram into the
air over his computer terminal. The hologram rotated to look at Wang-mu;
Peter sat up and assumed the same pose, facing her.

"There is a resemblance," she said.

"Of course, I'm younger," said Peter. "Because Ender didn't see me again
after he left Earth when he was -- what, five years old? A little runt,
anyway. I was still a boy. That's what he remembered, when he conjured me
out of thin air."

"Not air at all," she said. "Out of nothing."

"Not nothing, either," he said. "Conjured me, all the same." He smiled
wickedly. "I can call spirits from the vasty deep."

These words meant something to him, but not to her. In the world of Path
she had been expected to be a servant and so was educated very little.
Later, in the house of Han Fei-tzu, her abilities had been recognized,
first by her former mistress, Han Qing-jao, and later by the master
himself. From both she had acquired some bits of education, in a haphazard
way. What teaching there had been was mostly technical, and the literature
she learned was of the Middle Kingdom, or of Path itself. She could have
quoted endlessly from the great poet Li Qing-jao, for whom her one-time
mistress had been named. But of the poet he was quoting, she knew nothing.

"I can call spirits from the vasty deep," he said again. And then, changing
his voice and manner a little, he answered himself. "Why so can I, or so
can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?"