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

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.