"Liz Williams - Banner of Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

"It seems Memnos does not think so."
"How much have they told you about this child whom I am to guard?" Dreams-of-War asked.
"They have told me very little. In all probability," the doctor added, "as little as they have told you."
"And what about me?" Dreams-of-War asked uneasily. "If thisтАФthis cork in my psyche permitted me
to function as a warrior, to kill without qualm, what will happen now that it is gone?"
"Since you have just recently embarked upon my throttling," the doctor said, rubbing a bruised throat,
"I wouldn't worry too much about that."
CHAPTER 4
Earth
Tersus Rhee waddled slowly through the chamber, check-ing with thick fingers the drip-feeds that led
to the growing-skins, monitoring the minor changes and alterations that might token an incipient systems
failure. They had already lost the previous children. If this one, too, failed, the Grand-mothers had told
her, then the project might have to be terminated. And that would be a great shame. The Grand-mothers
had gone to an immense amount of trouble on be-half of the child in the growing-skin. The services of
Tersus Rhee herself had been procured. A Martian warrior was now on her way, at no small difficulty
and expense, to guard the child.
Tersus Rhee, for various reasons of her own, did not want the project to be terminated. The
Grandmothers had told her little enough about this line of made-humans, this special strain to whose care
she so diligently attended. But then, despite her skills, she knew that she was nothing more than the hired
help to the Grandmothers, just an-other kappa, indistinguishable from all the rest of her kind. She did not
expect to be told a great deal. She knew only that the child in the bag was known as the hito-bashira,
the woman-who-holds-back-the-flood. She had her own suspicions as to what this might mean.
But speculation had already run rife throughout the clans of the kappa when it was learned that she,
Tersus Rhee of Hailstone Shore, was to be sent all the way south to Fragrant Harbor to serve the
Grandmothers.
How much do you know about the Grandmothers?" the clan leader had asked Rhee.
"Very little." Rhee shuffled her wide feet in a supplica-tory gesture and spread her webbed hands
wide.
"Unsurprising. No one knows anything of them, it seemsтАФwho they are, where they come from.
Now, they keep to their mansion of Cloud Terrace, but it is not known how long they have been there.
They squat above the city like bats. Then, suddenly, they send word to me, asking for a grower, a carer.
An expert."
Rhee frowned. "Why are you telling me this? Am I to be that expert?"
The clan leader gave a slow frog blink. "Just so."
"But what about my duties here?"
"This is more important." The puffed eyelids drifted shut and tightened. Rhee knew that she would say
nothing further.
"When am I to leave?" Rhee asked in resignation.
"On the third day of the new moon, when the time is auspicious. Take what you need."
And so, with a hired junk waiting in the harbor below, Tersus Rhee had packed her equipment: the
box of scalpels, the neurotoxin feeds that, if carefully applied, would alter genetic development to the
desired specifica-tions, and a handful of the starter mulch that had now been in her family for seven
generations, nurtured and handed down like a precious yeast. For all else, she would be obliged to rely
on the Grandmothers of Cloud Terrace, and the thought did not please her.
The journey south pleased her even less. She would be traveling not as an expert hired by Cloud
Terrace, but incognito, as a hired help. This was so commonplace for the kappa as to be unremarked. It
was, after all, they who provided most of the worlds drudgery. Rhee traveled in the communal hold of the
junk but spent most of the day on deck, watching the peaks of the Fire Islands recede into the distance
until they were no bigger than pins against the lowering skies. From then on, the journey was un-eventful:
only ocean, like so much of Earth, wave after endless rolling wave. Rhee passed her time in the passive,