"Bc24" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry & Pournelle)

"I don't know."
She snuggled her head into the crook of his shoulder, saying to herself, as loudly as she dared. Yes, love. Call it love. Please, call it love.
He pulled up the blanket, tucking it under her chin, and sat up effortlessly. She could almost hear the gears grinding within his mind. His eyes stared out at the mountains on the horizon, and the stars above them, and she imagined that he could count them all.
"I've given you more than I've given anyone, Jessica."
"I know," she said. "Am I asking for too much?"
"No," he said quietly. "But you might be asking the wrong person." There was something that she had never heard in his voice before. A moment of self-doubt?
"There's something I've always wanted to ask," she said. "Was it hard for you? As a child. Not having any one family?"
Suddenly his lips curled in a merry smile, and she knew, knew, that his next response would be prefabricated, that the moment of truth had evaporated. "It was rough sometimes, but the roughest part was not knowing which family to stay with on a particular night. Every door was open," he said, and laughed. "They were all my family." And he laughed again.
The doors were open, to come in or to go out. But anyplace you can walk away from isn't home. You didn't have a home. Flit from one family to another, never deal with anything you didn't want to deal with. "Weren't you afraid that someday there wouldn't be a door open?"
"No. Why? I didn't do anything wrong, I was always who they wanted me to be." He turned and kissed her, more softly than she could ever remember. His perfect hair glowed in the moonlight, his mouth gentle upon hers. "This is our land, Jessica," he said. "We fought for it, and we are the ones to tame it."
"I know," she whispered.
"Our children will own this land."
His hands were soft on her arms, but she didn't try to squirm away from him. Somehow, she knew that it would be useless. His eyes trapped hers, and something within them terrified her.
"Our children. Yours and mine."
He'd said it. Suddenly, thoughts, feelings, sensations that she had never allowed herself to feel began to blossom within her, and she could feel it, feel where a child of Aaron's might grow within her, a void that opened like an awakening eye. Yes.
"Yes," she said. "I would love to carry your child."
"No!" he said fiercely. "You don't understand. The children of our bodies, yes, but we can have perfect children. Perfect. They can have everything, every advantage. We can control their nutrients, their prenatal education . . . everything."
His whisper was harsh, and his hands grew stronger upon her arms. "We can have a dozen, a hundred children at a time, and seed this entire continent with them."
Her hand stroked his cheek. From the dark of her hindbrain she felt the hope rising. "But we don't have to do that. I'd be happy--"
"No!" And her hand froze where it was. "My children will be perfect." He blinked, and then smiled, almost shyly. "At least, as perfect as we can make them."
Permission. She didn't have to be pregnant. Swollen, clumsy, imprisoned . . . But a tiny part of her had awakened, and was watching him, sensing something wrong.
He babbled on. "They will be our children. And they will own this land. You ask me if I love you. Can I come any closer than that? Do those words mean anything to you? Anything at all?" His weight was on her, and Jessica tried to fight. No. She wasn't ready emotionally. There was too much . . .
Truth?
In the air between them. She needed a moment to prepare herself, to slip back into the comfortable shell of sensuality she understood so well, nurtured by Sir John Woodruff and the Perfumed Garden, and the Quodoshka and the manuals of Taoist sexuality, and the erotic works of a world left far behind. But this moment wasn't one of the complex, artistically perfect couplings she had known with Aaron Tragon. This was something too damned similar to rape. She could call out, and it would stop--but so would any link between them. His was a need so deep that it burned. The hands on her, the mouth upon her, the thighs, hot and hard, that forced her legs open were somehow vulnerably, endearingly clumsy.
This wasn't the man she knew and loved. This was almost a boy, a boy who needed something that she couldn't quite bring herself to give.
And so he took it.
And took it.
And she pushed at him, and tore at him, and came to the edge, but didn't quite call out for help. And Aaron held her more tightly than he ever had, more insistently, his body one driving urgency.
He arched, and flushed, his face suffused with a kind of ecstatic, incandescent madness, his eyes, looking off to the horizon as he spasmed, seeing . . . what? What world of spires and mazes? What cities and glorious constructions of the far future? What world-girdling belt of roads and skyways that he might never live to see, but which children unborn might inherit?
Or did he see something else? His god, the grendel, perched upon a kill, perhaps his own torn corpse? And was this moment, and all of the other moments that they had had together, nothing but a means of slaving that moment off, of giving it some kind of meaning?
Did Aaron and her father share the same nightmare?
And was that why she loved them both?
Aaron collapsed atop her. His breath was hot and sweet, his hands curled up around her shoulders, his face tucked into her breast, his breath hot against her. She stroked his head and whispered to him, and knew that something had changed between them. She wasn't certain what, or what it would cost them. She knew only that there would be a cost, as certainly as Tau Ceti rose and set upon both Man and Grendel.