"Sheri S. Tepper - Shadow's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

Lutha turned away from his distress, giving herself time to think, holding her cup over the table and
feeling it grow heavier as it was filled with tea by an almost invisible shadow.

"What has all this to do with Leelson?" she asked.

"Now we're desperate to know whatever Bernesohn Famber knew. As long as Bernesohn's privacy
lease has any time to run, however, the only people Dinadh will allow to poke about among Bernesohn's
belongings are family members. Family is a very big thing on Dinadh. Since Leelson is descended from
Bernesohn, Leelson is Bernesohn's 'family,' so far as the Dinadhi are concerned."

Now Lutha understood what they were asking of her. "You need Leelson, but Leelson has
disappeared." She tapped her fingers, thinking. "Did you think I might know where Leelson is? Or did
you have some idea the Dinadhi would accept me as Leelson's 'family'?"

"I don't think you know where Leelson is, no. I know the Dinadhi will accept you as family. You are
Leelson's wife as they define wife."

When Lutha told me this, I laughed. It was true, in a way. She was Leelson's wife as we on Dinadh
define wife. Some of the time.

"Because we were lovers?" she asked him.

"Because you bore his child," the Procurator said.

She felt the blood leave her face, felt it drain away to disclose a familiar sorrow, an endless ache. "My
son is a private matter."

He sighed. "Believe me, Lutha Tallstaff, under other circumstances I would not challenge your privacy.
The Ularians give us no choice. Do you remember Mallia Stentas? From Keleborn?"

Lutha answered distractedly, "We were at upper school together. She became a manager for some
agricultural consortium тАж "

"You may mourn her nowтАФshe and her lifemates and all their many childrenтАФgone from Tapil's World.
And the people on Up-dyke-Chel. They are not merely dead, but dust in the wind, vanished and gone,
no stone to mark the place they were. Whatever the Ularians may be, when they come upon a world,
they leave behind no monuments тАж "

He stood, walked across the room to the wall retriever, and flicked it into life. "Tapil's World," he
murmured. "Beamed by our recorders."

An empty town materialized before them. Everywhere evidence of interruption. A doll lying abandoned
by a fence. A child's wagon, half-full of harvested vegetables, standing at the side of a fenced garden. A
sun hat caught in a thorny shrub. A fuzzy native animalтАФeither useful for something or a neutered pet, as
it would not have escaped homo-norming otherwiseтАФhopping slowly along a hedge, crying plaintively.
Kitchens with food half-prepared, rooms with tables still littered, desks still piled. The probe came down
over one desk, focusing on a holo that stood there. Herself. Mallia and herself, young scholars, arms
around one another, grinning into eternity.

"Damn you," Lutha said without heat.