"Sheri S. Tepper - The Vistor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

drum and let war begin..."

"Can you smell that? The stink wafts among the very stars, the spoor of the race that moves in the
direction of darkness! Look at this trail I have followed! This is the way it was, see why I have come
..."

"Ah, see there in the shadows! This is a creature mankind has made. See how he watches
you!"

"A chance yet. Still a chance you may bring them into the light..."

And herself whispering, How?... why?... what is it? What can I do?..."

Waking, she clings to that other existence as a furry infant to an arboreal mother, dizzied
but determined. She is unwilling to let go the mystery until she has unraveled it, and
she tries to go back, back into dream, but it is to no purpose. With sunlight the voices
vanish, along with the images and intentions she is so desperate to recover. Though they
are at the brink of her consciousness, they might as well be hidden in the depths of the
earth, for she is now only daylight Dism├й, blinking, stretching, scratching at the insistent
itch on her forehead as she wakens to the tardy sun that is just now heaving itself over
the sky-blocking peak of Mt. P'Jardas to the east.

"I am Dism├й," she says aloud, in a slightly quavering voice. Dism├й, she thinks, who sees
things that are not there. Dism├й who does not believe in the Dicta. Dism├й who believes
this life is, perhaps, the dream and that other life the reality.

Dism├й, she tries not to think, whose not-sister, Rashel Desh├┤ll, is Conservator of the
Faience Museum, tenant of the Conservator's House, and something else, far more
dreadful, as well.

1
dism├й the child
Deep in the night, a squall of strangled brass, a muted trumpet bray of panic: Aunt
Gayla Latimer, wailing in the grip of nightmare-followed shortly by footsteps.

"Papa?" Dism├й peered sleepily at her door, opened only a crack to admit her father's
nose, chin, one set of bare toes.

"It's Aunt Gayla having the Terrors, Dism├й. Just go back to sleep." He turned and
shuffled up the attic stairs to be greeted by Roger, Dism├й's older brother. Mumble,
mumble.

"Val?" A petulant whine from Father's room.

Voice from upstairs. "Go back to sleep, Cora."

Corable the Horrible, said a voice in Dism├й's head. Cora Call-Her-Mother.

"But she's not my mother," Dism├й had said a thousand times.