"Daniel, Tony - A Dry, Quiet War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniel Tony)

to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the
fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. "Didn't anybody
fight?" I asked.
"Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don't know. It
was bad for everybody, not just Rall." Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the
trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I,
and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat back down and watched it flicker.
"Sounds like war-ghosts," I said.
"The glims?"
"Soldiers who don't go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they
don't want to give it up, or can't. Sometimes they have ... modifications that
won't let them give it up. They wander the timeways нн and since they don't
belong to the time they show up in, they're hard to kill. In the early times,
where people don't know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had
lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies."
"What can you do?"
I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed
deeply, serenely.
"Hope they don't come back," I said. "They are bad ones. Not the worst, but
bad."
We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney's top, made
the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.
"Did you love him, Bex?" I asked. "Rall?"
She didn't even hesitate in her answer this time. "Of course not, Henry Bone.
How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now
tell me about the future."
And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her нн part of it at least.
About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together
again, not enough mass to undulate in eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end,
and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but
dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all
times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy to
galaxy, system to system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when
entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing.
No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain
... inherit the dark field. They win.
"And did you win?" she asked me. "If that's the word for it."
The suns were going down. Instead of answering, I went outside to the woodpile
and brought in enough banwood to fuel the fire for the night. I thought maybe
she would forget what she'd asked me нн but not Bex.
"How does the war end, Henry?"
"You must never ask me that," I spoke the words carefully, making sure I was
giving away nothing in my reply. "Every time a returning soldier tells that
answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away,
leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all
mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he
did in the war spin off into nothing."
Bex thought about this for a while. "What could it matter? What in God's name
could be worth fighting for?" she finally asked. "Time ends. Nothing matters
after that. What could it possibly matter who won ... who wins?"