"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

cut another clone from him to replace the destroyed Six; he of course
would be placed in charge of the new Six, by reason of his seniority. They
smiled at him, not seeing any reason why he wouldn't want to work
another twenty years with biological replicas of his dead brothers and
sisters, the men, additionally, reminders of what he'd been as a youth,
unravaged by years of pain. Heynith had thanked them politely, walked
out, and kept walking, crossing the Gray Waste on foot to join the
Quaestors.

I could see all this working in Heynith's face as he raged at Goth. Goth
could feel the hate too, but he stood firm. The null was incapable of doing
anybody any harm; he wasn't going to kill it. There'd been enough
slaughter. Goth's face was bloodless, and I could see D'kotta reflected in
his eyes, but I felt no sympathy for him, in spite of my own recent agonies.
He was disobeying orders. I thought about Mason, the man Goth had
replaced, the man who had died in my arms at Itica, and I hated Goth for
being alive instead of Mason. I had loved Mason. He'd been an
Antiquarian in the Urheim archives, and he'd worked for the Quaestors
almost from the beginning, years of vital service before his activities were
discovered by the Combine. He'd escaped the raid, but his family hadn't.
He'd been offered an admin job in Quaestor HQ, but had turned it down
and insisted on fieldwork in spite of warnings that it was suicidal for a
man of his age. Mason had been a tall, gentle, scholarly man who
pretended to be gruff and hard-nosed, and cried alone at night when he
thought nobody could see. I'd often thought that he could have escaped
from Itica if he'd tried harder, but he'd been worn down, sick and
guilt-ridden and tired, and his heart hadn't really been in it; that thought
had returned to puzzle me often afterward. Mason had been the only
person I'd ever cared about, the one who'd been more responsible than
anybody for bringing me out of the shadows and into humanity, and I
could have shot Goth at that moment because I thought he was betraying
Mason's memory.

Heynith finally ran out of steam, spat at Goth, started to call him
something, then stopped and merely glared at him, lips white. I'd caught
Heynith's quick glance at me, a nearly invisible head-turn, just before he'd
fallen silent. He'd almost forgotten and called Goth a zombie, a
widespread expletive on World that had carefully not been used by the
team since I'd joined. So Heynith had never really forgotten, though he'd
treated me with scrupulous fairness. My fury turned to a cold anger,
widened out from Goth to become a sick distaste for the entire world.

Heynith told Goth he would take care of him later, take care of him
good, and ordered me to go kill the null, take him upslope and out of sight
first, then conceal the body.

Mechanically, I pulled myself out of the trench, started downslope
toward the clearing. Anger fueled me for the first few feet, and I slashed
the shrubs aside with padded gloves, but it ebbed quickly, leaving me
hollow and numb. I'd known how the rest of the team must actually think