"Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Molt Brother" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lichtenberg Jacqueline)

Her mother made a small gesture of resignation, and hope surged through Arshel. But then her mother stepped to the
edge of the hatching pond and dipped the toe of her sandal into the warm water. Her venom sack quivered with the
power of her emotions as she looked into the water from which Arshel had emerged. Then, softly chanting the
hundred repetitions of Arshel's name in mourning, she turned and left the room, her back straight and her head held
high.
Her molt sister looked after her until the sound of her voice had faded among the pressed-sand archways and vaulted
chambers of the family home. Then she turned to Arshel.
"You have struck out for your adulthood, Arshel, and must now be counted as an adult, but not of Holtethor. If you
can choose and be chosen, then be also welcome at the home of your molt brother, for he is not welcome here now or
ever. Nor are you welcome. We mourn your loss in Holtethor, but death has taken our children before. We will go on."
Moving to the edge of the gently lapping water, she touched it with a toe. Chanting, she too turned and with-out
another glance went to join her molt sister in mourning the loss of a child.
Arshel was left alone in the silent house, with the noon sun barely glancing in the window through which the
pressed-sand domes of the city could be seen glittering hotly. In all that city, there was only one place for her, and that
was among the drylanders.
She went to her knees in the shallow water of the hatch-ing pond where she had struggled for and won the right to life.
Never to be allowed to touch these waters again, never to see her spawn churn their way to life from the waters that
had served her mother and mother's mother for more than ten generations. . . . Her venom sack stretched painfully as
emotion raged uncontrolled through her. She had never been happy in this house. They had never under-stood her.
Why should leaving hurt so much?
As she made her way across the island, back to the dig for the afternoon's work, it was as if she were seeing the city
for the first time: the domes, the lofty spires, the sweep-ing arches blending together like the waves of a stormy ocean
frozen in midrage and suspended forever, forbidden to strike. And the people, dressed in their floating veils, drifting
from place to place among their buildings, seemed suddenly alien.
Closer to the dig, buildings gave way to open hillside crisscrossed with footpaths. She encountered other young
people dressed as she, in shorts and shirt of the human style, moving in pairs back to work on the excavation. They
were coming in to check the bulletin board for the afternoon shift assignments. Then they'd march out into the pit,
toolboxes in hand, to begin the delicate work of dusting away layers of sand and soil, charting, recording, and
mapping.

They were uncovering an ancient city, perhaps built by long-dead aliens from another galaxy. Here, on Vrashin Is-land,
they might find the key to translating documents per-taining to the City of a Million Legends.
Known by many names on every planet of the Hundred Planets, it was called by Dennis "Shangri-la," "Atlantis," or
"Camelot." It was the long-ago place where people had once achieved perfection. There, people knew how to avoid
war, social crime, and poverty. But the City of a Million Legends, Arshel felt, had been a real place during the First
Lifewave occupation of the galaxy. If only half the legends were true and they could bring all that alive again todayтАФ
oh, how good life would be.
Standing in the shade of the open shed, she squinted against the glare to watch Dorsan, the human who was the dig's
official computer Interface, sitting cross-legged on a huge stone cube they had uncovered a few days before. He was
sorting through a large tray of minute items, turning each in his hands to examine it and then staring off into space
with that glassy-eyed, frozen stare that meant he was using the circuitry implanted in his brain to enter data into the
computer or to correlate data. She always found it dis-concerting when he did that, and today she found it fright-ening
when his wooden stare chanced to light on her.
She looked around anxiously for Dennis, knowing that he'd be reporting for shift now. When they'd parted, he had
said that there'd be no trouble telling his parents about the bhirhir. At home on the mainland, he had said, lots of his
friends had taken bhirhir. But what if his family, too, rejected them? Where would they go? She felt her venom sack
tighten until the skin of her throat felt as if it would split.
To distract herself, she picked up a toolbox and looked around for a spot nobody was working. There was a wall at one
edge of the pit that would have to be dismantled, but the stones had to be peeled away microlayer by micro-layer.
Arshel took down a medium-weight molecular sifter, caressing the worn handle familiarly. What they were look-ing for