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

"It means you can go back home," I said. "After it's over."
"I don't understand."
I shook my head and was silent. I had said enough. There was no way to tell her
more, in any case нн not without changing things. And no way to say what it was
that had brought those forces together at the end of everything. And what the
hell do I know, even now? All I know is what I was told and what I was trained
to do. If we don't fight at the end, there won't be a beginning. For there to be
people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that
kind of universe, and not another, they told me. They told me, and then I told
myself. And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home,
come back.
"Bex, I never forgot you," I said. She came to sit with me by the fire. We
didn't touch at first, but I felt her next to me, breathed the flush of her skin
as the fire warmed her. Then she ran her hand along my arm, felt the bumps from
the operational enhancements.
"What have they done to you?" she whispered.
Unbidden the old words of the skyfallers' scream, the words that were yet to be,
surfaced in my mind.
They sucked down my heart
to a little black hole
You cannot stab me.
They wrote down my brain
on a hard knot of space,
You cannot turn me.
Icicle spike
from the eye of a star
I've come to kill you.
I almost spoke them, from sheer habit. But I did not. The war was over. Bex was
here, and I knew it was over. I was going to feel something, once again,
something besides guile, hate and rage. I didn't yet, that was true, but I could
feel the possibility.
"I don't really breathe any more, Bex; I pretend to so I won't put people off,"
I told her. "It's been so long, I can't even remember what it was like to have
to."
Bex kissed me then. At first, I didn't remember how to do that either. And then
I did. I added wood to the fire, then ran my hand along Bex's neck and shoulder.
Her skin had the health of youth still, but years in the sun and wind had made a
supple leather of it, tanned and grained fine. We took the sheet from the couch
and pulled it near to the warmth, and she drew me down to her on it, to her neck
and breasts.
"Did they leave enough of you for me?" she whispered.
I had not known until now. "Yes," I answered, "There's enough." I found my way
inside her, and we made love slowly, in a way that might seem sad to any others
but us, for there were memories and years of longing that flowed from us, around
us, like amber just at the melting point, and we were inside and there was
nothing but this present with all of what was, and what would be, already
passed. No time. Finally, only Bex and no time between us.
We fell asleep on the old couch, and it was dim half-morning when we awoke, with
Fitzgerald yet to rise in the west and the fire a bed of coals as red as the
sky.