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

perceive."
He stares down at me, a muscular man with beautiful purple eyes. A healer who would kill.
A patriot defying his government to prevent a violent war. A sinner who does all he can to
minimize his sin and keep it from denying him the chance to rejoin his own ancestors. A
believer in shared reality who is trying to bend the reality without breaking the belief.
I keep quiet. The silence stretches on. Finally it is Pek Brifjis that breaks it. "I wish Carryl
Walters had never sent you to me."
"But he did. And I choose to return to my village. Will you let me go, or keep me prisoner
here, or murder me without my consent?"
"Damn you," he says, and I recognize the word as one Carryl Walters used, about the
unreal souls in Aulit Prison.
"Exactly," I say. "What will you do, Pek? Which of your supposed multiple realities will you
choose now?"


It is a hot night, and I cannot sleep.
I lie in my tent on the wide empty plain and listen to the night noises. Rude laughter from
the pel tent, where a group of miners drinks far too late at night for men who must bore into
hard rock at dawn. Snoring from the tent to my right. Muffled lovemaking from a tent farther
down the row, I'm not sure whose. The woman giggles, high and sweet.
I have been a miner for half a year now. After I left the northern village of Gofkit Ramloe,
Ori's village, I just kept heading north. Here on the equator, where World harvests its tin and
diamonds and pel berries and salt, life is both simpler and less organized. Papers are not
necessary. Many of the miners are young, evading their government service for one reason or
another. Reasons that must seem valid to them. Here government sections rule weakly,
compared to the rule of the mining and farming companies. There are no messengers on
Terran bicycles. There is no Terran science. There are no Terrans.
There are shrines, of course, and rituals and processions, and tributes to one's ancestors.
But these things actually receive less attention than in the cities, because they are more
taken for granted. Do you pay attention to air?
The woman giggles again, and this time I recognize the sound. Awi Pek Crafmal, the young
runaway from another island. She is a pretty thing, and a hard worker. Sometimes she reminds
me of Ano.
I asked a great many questions in Gofkit Ramloe. Ori Malfisit, Pek Brifjis said her name was.
An old and established family. But I asked and asked, and no such family had ever lived in
Gofkit Ramloe. Wherever Ori came from, and however she had been made into that unreal and
empty vessel shitting on a rich carpet, she had not started her poor little life in Gofkit Ramloe.
Did Maldon Brifjis know I would discover that, when he released me from the rich widow's
house overlooking the sea? He must have. Or maybe, despite knowing I was an informer, he
didn't understand that I would actually go to Gofkit Ramloe and check. You can't understand
everything.
Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night, I wish I had taken Pek Brifjis's offer to return
me to my ancestors.
I work on the rock piles of the mine during the day, among miners who lift sledges and
shatter solid stone. They talk, and curse, and revile the Terrans, although few miners have as
much as seen one. After work the miners sit in camp and drink pel, lifting huge mugs with dirty
hands, and laugh at obscene jokes. They all share the same reality, and it binds them
together, in simple and happy strength.
I have strength, too. I have the strength to swing my sledge with the other women, many
of whom have the same rough plain looks as I, and who are happy to accept me as one of