"Kress, Nancy - The Flowers of Aulit Prison" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

She does not ask what I wish in return for the favors of my supposed cousin. She knows. I sit beside her, and from now on I am physically safe in Aulit Prison from all but her.
Next, I must somehow befriend a Terran.
* * * *
This proves harder than I expect. The Terrans keep to themselves, and so do we. They are just as violent toward their own as all the mad doomed souls in Aulit; the place is every horror whispered by children trying to shock each other. Within a tenday I see two World men hold down and rape a woman. No one interferes. I see a Terran gang beat a Faller. I see a World woman knife another woman, who bleeds to death on the stone floor. This is the only time guards appear, heavily armored. A priest is with them. He wheels in a coffin of chemicals and immediately immerses the body so that it cannot decay to release the prisoner from her sentence of perpetual death.
At night, isolated in my cell, I dream that Frablit Pek Brimmidin appears and rescinds my provisional reality. The knifed, doomed corpse becomes Ano; her attacker becomes me. I wake from the dream moaning and weeping. The tears are not grief but terror. My life, and Ano's, hang from the splintery branch of a criminal alien I have not yet even met.
I know who he is, though. I skulk as close as I dare to the Terran groups, listening. I don't speak their language, of course, but Pek Brimmidin taught me to recognize the cadences of "Carryl Walters" in several of their dialects. Carryl Walters is an old Terran, with gray head fur cut in boring straight lines, wrinkled brownish skin, and sunken eyes. But his ten fingers -- how do they keep the extra ones from tangling them up? -- are long and quick.
It takes me only a day to realize that Carryl Walters's own people leave him alone, surrounding him with the same nonviolent respect that my protector gets. It takes me much longer to figure out why. Carryl Walters is not dangerous, neither a protector nor a punisher. I don't think he has any private shared realities with the guards. I don't understand until the World woman is knifed.
It happens in the courtyard, on a cool day in which I am gazing hungrily at the one patch of bright sky overhead. The knifed woman screams. The murderer pulls the knife from her belly and blood shoots out. In seconds the ground is drenched. The woman doubles over. Everyone looks the other way except me. And Carryl Walters runs over with his old-man stagger and kneels over the body, trying uselessly to save the life of a woman already dead anyway.
Of course. He is a healer. The Terrans don't bother him because they know that, next time, it might be they who have need of him.
I feel stupid for not realizing this right away. I am supposed to be good at informing. Now I'll have to make it up by immediate action. The problem, of course, is that no one will attack me while I'm under Afa Pek Fakar's protection, and provoking Pek Fakar herself is far too dangerous.
I can see only one way to do this.
A wait a few days. Outside in the courtyard, I sit quietly against the prison wall and breathe shallowly. After a few minutes I leap up. The dizziness takes me; I worsen it by holding my breath. Then I ram as hard as I can into the rough stone wall and slide down it. Pain tears through my arm and forehead. One of Pek Fakar's men shouts something.
Pek Fakar is there in a minute. I hear her -- hear all of them -- through a curtain of dizziness and pain.
" -- just ran into the wall, I saw it -- "
" -- told me she gets these dizzy attacks -- "
" -- head broken in -- "
I gasp, through sudden real nausea, "The healer. The Terran -- "
"The Terran?" Pek Fakar's voice, hard with sudden suspicion. But I gasp out more words, "...disease...a Terran told me...since childhood...without help I..." My vomit, unplanned but useful, spews over her boots.
"Get the Terran," Pek Fakar rasps to somebody. "And a towel!"
Then Carryl Walters bends over me. I clutch his arm, try to smile, and pass out.
* * * *
When I come to, I am lying inside, on the floor of the eating hall, the Terran cross-legged beside me. A few World people hover near the far wall, scowling. Carryl Walters says, "How many fingers you see?"
"Four. Aren't you supposed to have five?"
He unbends the fifth from behind his palm and says, "You fine."
"No, I'm not," I say. He speaks childishly, and with a odd accent, but he's understandable. "I have a disease. Another Terran healer told me so."
"Who?"
"Her name was Anna Pek Rakov."
"What disease?"
"I don't remember. Something in the head. I get spells."
"What spells? You fall, flop on floor?"
"No. Yes. Sometimes. Sometimes it takes me differently." I look directly into his eyes. Strange eyes, smaller than mine, and that improbable blue. "Pek Rakov told me I could die during a spell, without help."
He does not react to the lie. Or maybe he does, and I don't know how to read it. I have never informed on a Terran before. Instead he says something grossly obscene, even for Aulit Prison: "Why you unreal? What you do?"
I move my gaze from his. "I murdered my sister." If he asks for details, I will cry. My head aches too hard.
He says, "I sorry."
Is he sorry that he asked, or that I killed Ano? Pek Rakov was not like this; she had some manners. I say, "The other Terran healer said I should be watched carefully by someone who knows what to do if I get a spell. Do you know what to do, Pek Walters?"
"Yes."
"Will you watch me?"
"Yes." He is, in fact, watching me closely now. I touch my head; there is a cloth tied around it where I bashed myself. The headache is worse. My hand comes away sticky with blood.
I say, "In return for what?"
"What you give Pek Fakar for protection?"
He is smarter than I thought. "Nothing I can also share with you." She would punish me hard.
"Then I watch you, you give me information about World."
I nod; this is what Terrans usually request. And where information is given, it can also be extracted. "I will explain your presence to Pek Fakar," I say, before the pain in my head swamps me without warning, and everything in the dining hall blurs and sears together.
* * * *
Pek Fakar doesn't like it. But I have just given her a gun, smuggled in by my "cousin." I leave notes for the prison administration in my cell, under my bed. While the prisoners are in the courtyard -- which we are every day, no matter what the weather -- the notes are replaced by whatever I ask for. Pek Fakar had demanded a "weapon;" neither of us expected a Terran gun. She is the only person in the prison to have such a thing. It is to me a stark reminder that no one would care if all we unreal killed each other off completely. There is no one else to shoot; we never see anyone not already in perpetual death.
"Without Pek Walters, I might have another spell and die," I say to the scowling Pek Fakar. "He knows a special Terran method of flexing the brain to bring me out of a spell."
"He can teach this special method to me."
"So far, no World person has been able to learn it. Their brains are different from ours."
She glares at me. But no one, even those lost to reality, can deny that alien brains are weird. And my injuries are certainly real: bloody head cloth, left eye closed from swelling, skin scraped raw the length of my left cheek, bruised arm. She strokes the Terran gun, a boringly straight-lined cylinder of dull metal. "All right. You may keep the Terran near you -- if he agrees. Why should he?"
I smile at her slowly. Pek Fakar never shows a response to flattery; to do so would be to show weakness. But she understands. Or thinks she does. I have threatened the Terran with her power, and the whole prison now knows that her power extends among the aliens as well as her own people. She goes on glaring, but she is not displeased. In her hand the gun gleams.