"Marta Randall - Journey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randall Marta)

pursuit of their intricate, carefully plotted games. Mish Kennerin had seen
them as tiny, luminous figures darting through the dim reaches of the barn, so
far from her that the sound of their voices and the padding of their feet
muted with distance, becoming small, almost subliminal whisperings in the
still air. At those times Mish paused, almost breathless, her usual resentment
of the huge building replaced by a confusion of loss, a sense that the
structure breathed a dark magic which was slowly and certainly taking her
children from her. Uneasy and baffled, she would blink in the dimness before
turning away, often forgetting why and for what she had come, and stand
leaning at the monstrous doors, caught halfway between the darkness and the
light.
Even now the barn seemed to absorb the crowd of refugees, accepting
them into a segregated corner and reserving its distances for darkness and
quiet. Mish stood at the edge of a third-level balcony, her arms full of
blankets, and looked down at the bright corner of light. What seemed chaos was
in reality an almost shapeless order. The refugees lined up for the stew and
bread which Quilla and Jes ladled from the steaming caldron or popped from
large, cloth-covered baskets; the few bowls and plates were emptied and handed
to those still in line. Children ran shouting through the crowd, adults called
out over their bobbing heads, babies wailed. It seemed to Mish that the barn
floor below her boiled with an excess of emotion, a tide of relief. She
remembered her own landing on Terra so many years and lightyears before,
stumbling from the crowded belly of the ship into a winter of inspectors and
hard-faced guards, herded through examinations and searches, separated without
explanation into the group of workers allotted to the Altacostas, the group to
the Karlovs, the group to the Kennerins. But the contrast did not lighten her
mood, nor quell her foreboding. There were too many of them, too many arms and
legs and mouths and feet -- so many fresh and unknown souls that she shivered
before moving down the swaying rope ladder, blankets piled on her shoulders, a
small frown between her brows.
They had reeled from the shuttles onto alien ground, more than two
hundred of them, plucked by Jason Kennerin from a world gone sour, a world
soon to die. Carrying their few remaining belongings clutched to their bodies,
bringing memories of persecution and snow. Their world was dying, their
leaders had abdicated to the realms of insanity; this much Mish knew, had
known when Jason left on Captain Hetch's silver shuttle, gone to rescue those
he could, gone to make one family's small gesture of help. They had expected
no more than fifty people, sixty at the very most; one shuttle's worth of
refugees, one winter's surplus of food and clothing, no more -- only fifty new
faces, new bodies, new minds. Enough to handle, enough to understand. After
twelve years alone on Aerie, just Mish and Jason, Laur and the three children,
and the calm, marsupial native kasirene, Mish's memories of other humans had
blurred, until the crowds of her childhood took on Kennerin faces, and
although she fought against the impression as false, as dangerous, she had not
been able to shake it. The refugees would not be brown, Mongol-eyed, thin
people. They would be -- what? Strangers. Immigrants. Aliens. And so they
were, more than four times as many as she had expected, short and fat and thin
and dark and light, hair of many shades, faces in all shapes and sizes, eyes
of colors she had forgotten existed. For twelve years, Jason had been the only
tall one in the universe; now these strangers towered over her, tired, dirty,