"Buck, Doris P - Giberel, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Buck Doris Pitkin)

DORIS PITKIN BUCK

The Giberel

DORIS PITKIN BUCK was born in New York City on January 3, 1898. She remembers an incident of childhood as providing her first impulse toward creativity: ". . . someone showed me a piece of alabaster that let light through. I was fascinated. Later that same day I saw an old, old woman with the pale skin of extreme age. But she was beautiful. Like a glow of light. I stared a long time, gaping, before I told myself: alabaster!"

She received her A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College in 1920, her M.A. degree from Columbia University in 1925. Her first professional writing, in the 1930s, consisted of newspaper articles on wine and wine etiquette, and these brought her, in the way of readers' response, an avalanche of such questions as: "What is the correct wine to accompany graham crackers and milk?" Much later she began writing science fiction, both poetry and short stories. Her first published fiction was a short story in a 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. She attended the Milford Conferences and became a charter member of Science Fiction Writers of America.

Now three times a grandmother, she lives in North Carolina, practices hobbies ranging from little theater to gardening to cooking, pursues literary interests ". . . from Anatole France to Ellery Queen, from Beowulf and the Mabinogion to Steve Canyon-with special roses for Blake and Emily Dickinson," and continues to exercise her impeccable craftsmanship in adding to a modest literary corpus of powerful short stories such as "The Giberel," which envisions a future of man so remote that it seems to touch his past.

Aramere fell asleep, small flexible fingers closed about her new
toy, the wheel. Wheels could spin. Usually when told to rest she
lay in half dreams in her temple cubicle with all her fingers close
together as if they were stiff and could hardly move. Now she used
them recklessly. Her wheel spun.

She was so happy that the Star Priests' talk, drifting in fragmented, left her unworried, as a deep voice spoke, "I spit upon the Bomb."

One answered, "Why so? Perchance it made us evolve . . . something better than the forefathers of our forefathers."

"We do not know what men were like before. Even their bones have crumbled."

"Could be they had no thumbs in those days. No thumbs at all."

Aramere knew the routine that would follow. The nearly rigid first joints of the priests' fingers would stroke the hard spurs sticking out above their wrists. As she dozed, worn out from play, she touched her own, proudly. Her thumb was like everyone else's.

She laid the wheel against her cheek and told it maybe what the priests said had no meaning, even for them. Or maybe they had meaning for she repeated to herself-for toad folk. Somebody had told her such people were hardly human though they dared think they had forms and hands finer than anyone in all the rest of the world. Her breath came in a little gulp at the idea. For weren't they shorter, sometimes a whole head shorter, than her people, giberels? Didn't they work by day, those toad folk?

Aramere's thoughts veered off. Tonight: her third birthday. She could almost see toys that would be hers in a new home, for the
temple foundling had been wooed by a foster mother as in some lands maids are wooed to gain their consent to a marriage. Her hand still clutched a cake. As she waited for her mother's return, her mouth knew unfamiliar tastes, sweet and spicy.

She waked in the dark. She felt a hand over her mouth. She tried to bite it.

The bite did her little good. Fists shoved at her jaw. Palms pressed down against her head. She wanted to scratch, but her nails were still soft, as they would be till she was seven.

Through the night's blackness she was half pushed, half carried outside. Wind hit her face. Her body, sweaty from attempts to twist and turn, chilled. Her mouth felt dry. Her jaws were held firmly or her teeth would have chattered.

The strangers carried Aramere a long way, then set her down in a field. She was too sick with fright to notice the planted rows that stretched indistinct in the starlight, almost out of sight.

"The girl seems the right size for a giberel. She's like to us," several voices argued in her behalf.

They brought a stick, straight, smooth, polished, and held her against it, so frightened she would have slumped in a heap on the ground without support.

"Sixty measures."

"As giberels should be."

"She may be fit to adopt."