"Nancy Kress - Probability Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Stefanak viewed the cube once, and then again. He sat thinking for a full five minutes, very
carefully. The Zeus was available, or could be made available, without attracting significant
attention. A command-level line officer could not be made available, but there were ways around
that. Physicists... leave that to Malone. But maybe the whole mission could be made to look like
just another low-priority scholarly expedition. Yes. Salernos would be the one to arrange that, she
had plausible contacts...
When Stefanak finished his planning, he released the security shield. Malone waited outside.
The general told him to put together an immediate meeting with the Solar Alliance Defense
Council, highest-ranking officers only, all participating governments urged most strongly to
attend.
This might change everything.



-=*=-



ONE
RAFKIT SELOE

When Enli came outside at sunrise, her flower beds had been destroyed. The curving line of
border stones had been pointedly straightened. The jelit bushes, not yet in flower, sat broken into
pathetic piles of twigs. No one, of course, would harm the ollinib or pajalib, now in full glorious
bloom; they must have been transplanted to some neighbor's garden. Enli studied the holes where
the broken jelitib had been. At the bottom of one hole was something dark and matted, vaguely
damp-looking. She fished it out with a stick. A dead freb. Enli poked the little mammal carefully,
to see how it had died, and eventually she saw the place in the flopping neck where the knife had
gone in.
So her neighbors even knew about Tabor.
Enli's neckfur prickled. She glanced around. No one in sight, even though the sun was above
the horizon and the weather clear and warm. There should have been people riding to the fields,
to the soap manufactury by the river, to Rafkit Seloe. Children should be playing in the village
square, eating their cold breakfasts together, grudgingly minding smaller brothers and sisters.
Instead, there was only silence and emptiness, as pointed a message as the straightened stone
border and missing plants. Her neighbors were waiting for Enli Pek Brimmidin to leave.
She walked around the flower bed again, pretending to study it, working to calm her breathing.
It was always a shock. Not an unexpected shock -- this was, after all, the fifth time that a village
had discovered who she was and forced her to move on. Sometimes they did it this way, stopping
all real activities in her presence. Other times they just looked straight through her, pretending not
to see her, carrying on the life of the village as if an unreal person were not among them, as if
Enli were a ghost. Which, of course, she was. She was unreal.
Well, she couldn't stay here any longer. Her neighbors had the right of it, after all. How much
did they know? That she was unreal, yes. That she stood convicted of killing her brother. That
Reality and Atonement had, for reasons of their own, not put her in Aulit Prison for the crime.
Did the neighbors know that she was working to earn back her reality? Probably not. Although
the brighter ones might guess. Old Frablit, for instance. Not much got past that one's grizzled
neckfur. Maybe Inno. Maybe Glamit.
Enli sat down on the bench outside her hut to consider where she should go. Farther north,
maybe. Word about her might not travel north as easily; most people in this village seemed to