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

"Shakespeare?" she guessed.

He grinned at her. She thought of the way a cat smiles at the creature it
is toying with. "That's always the best guess when a European is doing the
quoting," he said.

"The quotation is funny," she said. "A man brags that he can summon the
dead. But the other man says that the trick is not calling, but rather
getting them to come."

He laughed. "What a way you have with humor."

"This quotation means something to you, because Ender called you forth from
the dead."

He looked startled. "How did you know?"

She felt a thrill of fear. Was it possible? "I did not know, I was making a
joke."

"Well, it's not true. Not literally. He didn't raise the dead. Though he no
doubt thinks he could, if the need arose." Peter sighed. "I'm being nasty.
The words just come to my mind. I don't mean them. They just come."

"It is possible to have words come to your mind, and still refrain from
speaking them aloud."

He rolled his eyes. "I wasn't trained for servility, the way you were."

So this was the attitude of one who came from a world of free people -- to
sneer at one who had been a servant through no fault of her own. "I was
trained to keep unpleasant words to myself as a matter of courtesy," she
said. "But perhaps to you, that is just another form of servility."

"As I said, Royal Mother of the West, nastiness comes unbidden to my
mouth."

"I am not the Royal Mother," said Wang-mu. "The name was a cruel joke --"

"And only a very nasty person would mock you for it." Peter grinned. "But
I'm named for the Hegemon. I thought perhaps bearing ludicrously
overwrought names was something we might have in common."

She sat silently, entertaining the possibility that he might have been
trying to make friends.

"I came into existence," he said, "only a short while ago. A matter of
weeks. I thought you should know that about me."

She didn't understand.