"Butler, Octavia - Xenogenesis 01 - Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Butler Octavia E)

"He's well."
She felt reassured at that and immediately questioned the emotion. Why should one more anonymous voice telling her everything was fine reassure her?
"Can I see him?" she asked.
"Jdahya?" the voice said.
Jdahya turned toward her. "You'll be able to see him when you can walk among us without panic. This is your last isolation room. When you're ready, I'll take you outside."



3

Jdahya would not leave her. As much as she had hated her solitary confinement, she longed to be rid of him. He fell silent for a while and she wondered whether he might be sleeping-to the degree that he did sleep. She lay down herself, wondering whether she could relax enough to sleep with him there. It would be like going to sleep knowing there was a rattlesnake in the room, knowing she could wake up and find it in her bed.
She could not fall asleep facing him. Yet she could not keep her back to him long. Each time she dozed, she would jolt awake and look to see if he had come closer. This exhausted her, but she could not stop doing it. Worse, each time she moved, his tentacles moved, straightening lazily in her direction as though he were sleeping with his eyes open-as he no doubt was.
Painfully tired, head aching, stomach queasy, she climbed down from her bed and lay alongside it on the floor. She could not see him now, no matter how she turned. She could see only the platform beside her and the walls. He was no longer part of her world.
"No, Lilith," he said as she closed her eyes.
She pretended not to hear him.
"Lie on the bed," he said, "or on the floor over here. Not over there."
She lay rigid, silent.
"If you stay where you are, I'll take the bed."
That would put him just above her-too close, looming over her, Medusa leering down.
She got up and all but fell across the bed, damning him, and, to her humiliation, crying a little. Eventually she slept. Her body had simply had enough.
She awoke abruptly, twisting around to look at him. He was still on the platform, his position hardly altered. When his head tentacles swept in her direction she got up and ran into the bathroom. He let her hide there for a while, let her wash and be alone and wallow in self-pity and self-contempt. She could not remember ever having been so continually afraid, so out of control of her emotions. Jdahya had done nothing, yet she cowered.
When he called her, she took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom. "This isn't working," she said miserably. "Just put me down on Earth with other humans. I can't do this."
He ignored her.
After a time she spoke again on a different subject. "I have a scar," she said, touching her abdomen. "I didn't have it when I was on Earth. What did your people do to me?"
"You had a growth," he said. "A cancer. We got rid of it. Otherwise, it would have killed you."
She went cold. Her mother had died of cancer. Two of her aunts had had it and her grandmother had been operated on three times for it. They were all dead now, killed by someone else's insanity. But the family "tradition" was apparently continuing.
"What did I lose along with the cancer?" she asked softly.
"Nothing."
"Not a few feet of intestine? My ovaries? My uterus?"
"Nothing. My relative tended you. You lost nothing you would want to keep."
"Your relative is the one who... performed surgery on me?"
"Yes. With interest and care. There was a human physician with us, but by then she was old, dying. She only watched and commented on what my relative did."
"How would he know enough to do anything for me? Human anatomy must be totally different from yours."
"My relative is not male-or female. The name for its sex is ooloi. It understood your body because it is ooloi. On your world there were vast numbers of dead and dying humans to study. Our ooloi came to understand what could be normal or abnormal, possible or impossible for the human body. The ooloi who went to the planet taught those who stayed here. My relative has studied your people for much of its life."
"How do ooloi study?" She imagined dying humans caged and every groan and contortion closely observed. She imagined dissections of living subjects as well as dead ones. She imagined treatable diseases being allowed to run their grisly courses in order for ooloi to learn.
"They observe. They have special organs for their kind of observation. My relative examined you, observed a few of your normal body cells, compared them with what it had learned from other humans most like you, and said you had not only a cancer, but a talent for cancer."
"I wouldn't call it a talent. A curse, maybe. But how could your relative know about that from just. . . observing."
"Maybe perceiving would be a better word," he said. "There's much more involved than sight. It knows everything that can be learned about you from your genes. And by now, it knows your medical history and a great deal about the way you think. It has taken part in testing you."
"Has it? I may not be able to forgive it for that. But listen, I don't understand how it could cut out a cancer without. . . well, without doing damage to whichever organ it was growing on."
"My relative didn't cut out your cancer. It wouldn't have cut you at all, but it wanted to examine the cancer directly with all its senses. It had never personally examined one before. When it had finished, it induced your body to reabsorb the cancer.
"It. . . induced my body to reabsorb. . . cancer?"
"Yes. My relative gave your body a kind of chemical command."
"Is that how you cure cancer among yourselves?"
"We don't get them."
Lilith sighed. "I wish we didn't. They've created enough hell in my family."
"They won't be harming you anymore. My relative says they're beautiful, but simple to prevent."
"Beautiful?"
"It perceives things differently sometimes. Here's food, Lilith. Are you hungry?"
She stepped toward him, reaching out to take the bowl, then realized what she was doing. She froze, but managed not to scramble backward. After a few seconds, she inched toward him. She could not do it quickly-snatch and run. She could hardly do it at all. She forced herself forward slowly, slowly.
Teeth clenched, she managed to take the bowl. Her hand shook so badly that she spilled half the stew. She withdrew to the bed. After a while she was able to eat what was left, then finish the bowl. It was not enough. She was still hungry, but she did not complain. She was not up to taking another bowl from his hand. Daisy hand. Palm in the center, many fingers all the way around. The fingers had bones in them, at least; they weren't tentacles. And there were only two hands, two feet. He could have been so much uglier than he was, so much less. . . human. Why couldn't she just accept him? All he seemed to be asking was that she not panic at the sight of him or others like him. Why couldn't she do that?