"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 7" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

belonging to the moving company. Elya recognized a new gene synthesizer, gleaming expensively, along
with other machines that she, not a scientist, couldn't identify. Through a half-open door, she saw a small
bathroom. It all must have cost enormously. Cassie had better work hard as a consultant.
And now she could do so without ever leaving this self-imposed prison. Design her medical micros,
send the data encrypted over the Net to the client. If it weren't for Jane and Donnie... Elya grasped at
this. There were Janey and Donnie, and Janey would need to be picked up at school very shortly now.
At least the kids would get Cassie out of this place periodically.
Cassie was still defining her imprisonment, in that brittle voice. "There's a Faraday cage around the
entire house, of course, embedded in the walls. No EMP can take us out. The walls are reinforced
foamcast concrete, the windows virtually unbreakable polymers. We have enough food stored for a year.
The water supply is from a well under the house, part of the geothermal system. It's cool, sweet water.
Want a glass?"
"No," Elya said. "Cassie... you act as if you expect full-scale warfare. Vlad was killed by an individual
nutcase."
"And there are a lot of nutcases out there," Cassie said crisply. "I lost Vlad. I'm not going to lose
Janey and Donnie... hey! There you are, pumpkin!"
"I came downstairs!" Donnie said importantly, and flung himself into his mother's arms. "Annie said!"
Cassie smiled over her son's head at his young nanny, Anne Millius. The smile changed her whole
face, Elya thought, dissolved her brittle shell, made her once more the Cassie that Vlad had loved. A
whole year. Cassie completely unreconciled, wanting only what was gone forever. It wasn't supposed to
be like this. Or was it that she, Elya, wasn't capable of the kind of love Cassie had for Vlad? Elya had
been married twice, and divorced twice, and had gotten over both men. Was that better or worse than
Cassie's stubborn, unchippable grief?
She sighed, and Cassie said to Donnie, "Here's Aunt Elya. Give her a big kiss!"
The three-year-old detached himself from his mother and rushed to Elya. God, he looked like Vlad.
Curly light brown hair, huge dark eyes. Snot ran from his nose and smeared on Elya's cheek.
"Sorry," Cassie said, grinning.
"Allergies?"
"Yes. Although... does he feel warm to you?"
"I can't tell," said Elya, who had no children. She released Donnie. Maybe he did feel a bit hot in her
arms, and his face was flushed a bit. But his full-lipped smileтАФVlad againтАФand shining eyes didn't look
sick.
"God, look at the time, I've got to go get Janey," Cassie said. "Want to come along, Elya?"
"Sure." She was glad to leave the lab, leave the basement, leave the "castle." Beyond the confines of
the Faraday-embedded concrete walls, she took deep breaths of fresh air. Although of course the air
inside had been just as fresh. In fact, the air inside was recycled in the most sanitary, technologically
advanced way to avoid bringing in pathogens or gases deliberately released from outside. It was much
safer than any fresh air outside. Cassie had told her so.

No one understood, not even Elya.
Her sister-in-law thought Cassie didn't hear herself, didn't see herself in the mirror every morning,
didn't know what she'd become. Elya was wrong. Cassie heard the brittleness in her voice, saw the
stoniness in her face for everyone but the kids and sometimes, God help her, even for them. Felt herself
recoiling from everyone because they weren't Vlad, because Vlad was dead and they were not. What
Elya didn't understand was that Cassie couldn't help it.
Elya didn't know about the dimness that had come over the world, the sense of everything being
enveloped in a gray fog: people and trees and furniture and lab beakers. Elya didn't know, hadn't
experienced, the frightening anger that still seized Cassie with undiminished force, even a year later, so
that she thought if she didn't smash something, kill something as Vlad had been killed, she'd go insane.
Insaner. Worse, Elya didn't know about the longing for Vlad that would rise, unbidden and unexpected,