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

years local that had passed, and, of course, they had no conception of what
had
happened to me. They only knew that I'd been to the war -- the Big War at the
End of Time -- and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back
in
my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro's desert barley, brought in
peat
from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from
my
hard ground water, and got ready for making whisky once again. Most of the
inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whisky families and beer families.
Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations
before.
It wasn't until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the
troubles
that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under
the floorplanks of her father's hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I
left
for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at
forty,
five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my
house,
a week after I returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro, and she
might
be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy and she wore
a
khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she walked down the road. I stood
on
the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.
"Well, this is a load off of me," she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It
had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her
hand
on it to keep it from blowing from her head. "This damn ranch has been one
big
thankless task."
"So it was you who kept it up," I said.
"Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise," she
replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were
green.
Now I had seen an ocean, and I could understand the kind of green they were.
"Well then," I finally said. "Come on in."



I offered her some sweetcake I'd fried up, and some beer that my neighbor,
Shin,
had brought by, both of which she declined. We sat in the living room, on
furniture covered with the white sheets I had yet to remove. Bex and I took
it
slow, getting to know each other again. She ran her father's place now. For