"Cory Doctorow - A Place So Foreign" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

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I went straight home, pelting down the road as fast as I could, not even looking
where I was going. I let the door slam behind me and took the stairs two at a
time up to the attic ladder, then bolted the trap-door shut behind me and sat in
the dark, with my knees in my chest.

Down below, Mama let out a half-hearted, "James? Is that you?" like she always
did since I came back home. I ignored her, like always, and she stopped worrying
about it, like always.

Pa's last trip had been to the Dalai Lama's court in 1975. The man from the
embassy said that he was going to talk with the monks about a "white-paper that
the two embassies were jointly presenting on the effect of mimetic
ambassadorships on the reincarnated soul." It was all nonsense to me. He'd never
arrived. The teleporter said that it had put him down gentle as you like on the
floor of the Lama's floating castle over the Caspian Sea, but the monks never
saw him.

And that was that.

It had been a month since our return. I'd ventured out into town and looked up
my chums, and found them so full of gossip that didn't mean anything to me; so
absorbed with games that seemed childish to me; so strange, that I'd retreated
home. I'd prowled around our house like a burglar at first, and when I came back
to the attic, all the numbness that had enveloped me since the man from the
State Department had teleported into our apt melted away and I started bawling.



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The attic had always been Pa's domain. He'd come up here with whatever crackpot
invention he'd ordered this month out of a catalog or one of the expensive,
foreign journals he subscribed to, and tinker and swear and hit his thumbnail
and tear his pants on a stray dingus and smoke his cheroots and have a heck of a
time.

The muffled tread of his feet and the distant cursing while I sat in the parlour
downstairs had been the homiest sound I knew. Mama and I would lock eyes every
time a particularly forceful round of hollers shook down, and Mama would get a
little smile and her eyes would crinkle, and I felt like we were sharing a
secret.

Now, the attic was my private domain: there was the elixir shelf, full of patent
medicines, hair-tonics, and soothing syrups. There was the bookcase full of wild
theories and fantastic adventure stories. There were the crates full of