"Linda Nagata - Goddesses" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nagata Linda)

Goddesses
by Linda Nagata



I
In the birthing room of a tiny clinic, in a town in Southern India, holding the hand of another man's wife,
Michael Fielding felt chaos rise quietly through the world. Like the gentle flood of an untamed river, it
seeped into his life, dissolving the past, laying down the mud that would grow the future.

Jaya's hand tightened on his. Her lips parted, ruby-red jewels set against her cream-coffee skin, their
color that of a tailored strain of bacteria cohabiting in her cells.

"Another's starting," she whispered. Exhaustion feathered her words. "Michael тАж all the old women lied
тАж when they promised it would be easier тАж the second time."

"You're almost there," he assured her. "You're doing terrific."

Sheo's voice backed him up, speaking from the beige picture frame of the open portal, sitting on the
rickety metal table at the head of the bed. It was a voice-only connection, so the portal's screen
displayed a generic sequence of abstract art. "Michael's right, my love. You are wonderful."

"Sheo?" Jaya's dark eyes opened. She turned toward Michael, but she wasn't looking at him. Instead,
her gaze fixed on the lens of his net visor that concealed his eyes like gray sunglasses. She seemed to
search the shades for some trace of her husband. Her expression was captured by tiny cameras on the
shades' frame. Processors translated her image to digital code, then shunted it to Sheo's mobile address,
across town or across the continentтАФMichael had lost track of how far Sheo had progressed in his
frantic journey to meet his wife.

Jaya should have been home in Bangalore, enjoying the services of the finest hospital in the country. She
did not belong in this primitive clinic, where the obstetrician was a face on a monitor, checking on her
through a stereoscopic camera that pointed between her legs.

Of course it was Michael's fault. He'd been in-country two weeks, the new district director for Global
Shear. It was an assignment he'd coveted, but with only five days' notice before his transfer from the
Hong Kong office, he had not been ready for it.

Jaya took pity on him. Claiming her maternity leave might otherwise end in terminal boredom, she took a
train to Four Villages, to help Michael find his way through barriers of language and local custom.

He and Jaya had both interned at Global Shear, members of a five-person training team so cohesive that,
ten years after the course work ended, four of them still met almost daily on a virtual terrace to exchange
the news of their private lives and their careers. When Jaya stepped off the train to embrace Michael on
the dusty platform, it was the first time they had ever met in real space тАж and it hadn't mattered. If they
had grown up in the same house, Michael could not have felt any closer to her.

Now the baby was coming three weeks early.

Everything happened so much faster these days.