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

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."