"Vonda N. McIntyre-Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

"I hoped I would be killed."
"Deep despair for one so young."
"It's dying," the youth said. "Everything's dying."
The keeper saw that the youth was half-irrational from pain and exhaustion. "Sleep," he said.
"Don't you believe me? Didn't you know? You're supposed to be a seer."
"Thou art very cynical."
The youth did not answer, turned away, tried, clumsily, to flex the splinted wing.
"It is less solid than the earth," the keeper said. "Thou shouldst be gentle."
"Why did you help me? Why should you care?" the youth cried in confusion, hatred, grief.
"Go to sleep," the keeper said.
He moved inside the temple to perform his duties. They were few, and empty tradition. The god had
departed, long before its last, ridiculed worshippers, as gods always do. The keeper knew that, and
allowed himself no illusions about his status. It was his by chance and luck and response to pain, not
divine gift. He poured libations to a memory, to a real god, the soul of unconscious things, not outgrown
but driven away.
When he had finished his rituals, he returned to the youth, who slept the healing sleep. The keeper felt
the throat-pulse and temperature and found neither sufficiently elevated. The precarious, rapid
metabolism of their species had to accelerate when called on to heal. The keeper hunched down beside
the bed, newly concerned. The youth's fine wide broken wing lay stretched open across the gray stone
courtyard, useless as insulation, losing heat. The keeper did not stir for quite a long time. Finally he
moved, painfully, and lay down on the narrow pallet. Quite chastely, and with some guilty reluctance, he
enfolded the youth in his own one good wing. Then he, too, slept.
Much time had passed since anyone had come to induce prophecies, to wait as he hunched before the
altar, sleep-watching, tranced. Now, lying beside the youth, he could feel a vision at the edge of his mind,
but it was too distant and too weak to grasp. All the youth's resources were focused within; none were
left for resonances. After exhausting himself struggling toward the vision in sleep, the keeper only
dreamed. He awoke with memories of close, beckoning stars and high thin air, and a twisting sense of
loss. He had dreamed of flying with his mate, so high that below them the earth curved away, yellow and
brown and white-wisped with clouds. The sky was purple and gold in the daytime, shading to pale blue
on the horizons, black and silver at night. He had loved his mate, but she was dead, and he had loved the
night, but it was beyond his reach.
The keeper lay still, unwilling to move and renew his pain. But he must; his own warmth had helped a
little, but the youth's body needed food to maintain itself.
The keeper's supplies were not well suited to providing sufficient energy. No one brought meat
anymore, and he could not hunt. He was crippled, fit only to serve an abandoned god. He lifted his wing,
folded it silently, and rose, to prepare seed paste and broth. He moved slowly, masking pain with
caution, and the appearance of grace. Before, when people had come, his manner toward them had been
equally graceful, and the children had lost their reticence after only a little while. The adults preferred to
pretend apprehension and fear, for they came to the temple to keep their excitement high, to combat
impatience, as they would glide over a live volcano or chase a whirlwind. Sometimes the fear could be
real. If they stayed long enough, he might tell them their deaths with enigmatic visions they would not
recognize until they were imminent. That was the way of seers. But the people were gone; they did not
need him anymore. They had not really needed him for a long time, and perhaps they had never needed
him at all.
The keeper carried the broth outside and held the shallow bowl to the youth's lips. The youth,
half-awake, eyes half-open, seemed not to notice the vegetable taste. The keeper felt the thin tight
muscles and smooth skin against his supporting hand, but at the same time saw the ugly eyes again. They
were like the soft jellied plants or creatures that grew in the dark, and died in the sunlight. He envied the
youth's wings, but pitied the eyes. His patient could never fly much higher than the clouds without going
blind.