"Sheri S. Tepper - Dervish Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

as we started off into the gray light of early dawn.
'Someone's getting rid of excess population,' he mum-
bled. 'Dribs and drabs of it.'
'What I can't figure out is how and why certain ones
are so all of a sudden excess! We've found dead
Gamesmen and dead pawns, young and old, male and
female. All with these same damn yellow things. The
crystals are all alike, same color, same size. Someone
has to be making them!'
'You've mentioned that before, Jinian. Several times,
as I recall." He sighed, yawned, scratched himself. 'You
know, girl,' he drawled, going into one of his ponder-
ous perorations, 'though we may conjecture until we
have worn imagination to shreds, theorize until our
brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with
mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we
find out where they're coming from, anything we guess


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CHAPTER ONE

is only hot air and worth about as much.' He fell into a
brooding silence as we rattled on with the krylobos
talking nonsense to one another and Peter and Chance
riding just ahead. So we had ridden, league on league,
hundreds and hundreds of them, ever since leaving the
lands of the True Game. Some days it seemed we'd
been riding like this forever.
I could see Peter's animated profile from time to
time as he turned to speak to Chance. His face was
bronze from the sun. He'd grown up, too, in the last
few seasons. The bones in his cheeks and jaw were
bold, no longer child-like, and there was a strong
breadth to his forehead. It was his mouth that got to
me, though, the way his upper lip curved down in the
center, a funny little dip, as though someone had
pinched it. Every time I saw that, I wanted to touch it
with my tongue. Like a sweet. No. Not like a sweet.
Well, I needed comforting, and seeing him there
within reach, within touching distance, made me want
to yell or run or go hide in the wagon.
Sometimes I wished that the way I felt about Peter
was an illness. If it were an illness, a Healer could cure it.
As it was, it went on all the time with no hope of a cure.
Every morning when the early light made sensuous
wraiths of the mists, every evening when the dusk
ghosts crept into erotic tangles around the foliage (see,
even my language was getting lubricious), I found
myself thinking unhelpful thoughts that made me