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

A shriek tore the night. The pressure on Aramere's body loosened a little. Warm arms wrapped themselves about her-her new mother. Aramere began to sob. I lot tears came to wash all the coldness into the blackest part of the night.

"You cannot kill my foundling, true giberel or no." Then, almost taunting, "And what is a giberel? No one even knows the meaning of the word."

Someone shouted, "That's one of the many meanings lost when the Bomb fell." But most of them tried to hiss her into silence.

Aramere's mother cried over the noise, "I tell you all, she has value."

"What value, demented woman?" Once more the cold started to slap like water against Aramere.

Her mother's arms wrapped her more intensely. More warmly.

"She has crop-magic. The power of which we have legends. Take your hands off her. We shall yet eat our fill."

"How know you this, woman'."'

"I watched her. I saw a marvel. Certainty is in me, as it was that you gathered to do her harm. I knew."

Several voices demanded, "So you came running?"

"So I came running."

"For nothing you winded yourself. We have passed a doom upon . this child who, though she is tall and fair like a maple tree, is no purebred creature. She is a menace to be destroyed."

"It is so." The giberels began to hum again.

"This is no ritual. It is murder."

"Justice."

"You lie in your throat of ice, Cold Tone. Proceed with this and I shall have you arraigned."

"And I shall stop your proceedings, easily, as I have stopped this false adoption."

"You have not heard me out. Crop-magic lives in this child. My q words are true. I have seen a marvel-as I said." '

They stopped their humming to ask, "What marvel?"

"When she passes a food plant, it bends its head. Very little, for . she is still young. But it bends."

"It does," Aramere piped.

"Throw her in the grave," Cold Tone ordered.

Many voices babbled, "We have our legends of miracles, of abundance long past or to come. If she has a body of magic, per- . haps a new plant will grow from her grave. A plant with fruits twenty times larger than all the fruits we know."

Suddenly Aramere shrilled, still clinging to her new parent, "I .. know what I can do, though I have never done it all the way."

"Yes? Yes?" With a rising inflection: "What can you do?"