"Gardner Dozois & Jack Haldeman - Executive Clemency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

received. Mr. Samuels went cantering by him, up on his big roan horse, carbine sheathed in a
saddle holster, horseshoes ringing against the pavement: off to patrol with the Outriders for the
day. Mr. Samuels waved at him as he passed, looking enormously tall and important and adult up on
the high
saddle, and Jamie answered with the shy, wide, loose lipped grin that sometimes seemed vacuous
even to him. He ducked his head again when Mr. Samuels was out of sight and frowned at the dusty
tops of his shoes. The sun was up above the trees and the rooftops now, and it was getting warm.
The five-story brick school building was the tallest building in Northview-now that the bank had
burned down-and it cast a cool, blue shadow across his path as he turned onto Main Street. It was
still used as a school in the winter and on summer afternoons after the children had come back
from the fields, but it was also filled with stockpiles of vital supplies so that it could be used
as a stronghold in case of a siege-something that had happened only once, fifteen years ago, when
a strong raiding party had come up out of the south. Two fifty-caliber machine guns-salvaged from
an Army jeep that had been abandoned on the old state highway a few weeks after the War-were
mounted on top of the school's roof, where their field of fire would cover most of the town. They
had not been fired in earnest for years, but they were protected from the weather and kept in good
repair, and a sentry was still posted up there at all times, although by now the sentry was likely
to smuggle a girl up to the roof with him on warm summer nights. Times had become more settled,
almost sleepy now. Similarly, the Outriders who patrolled Northview's farthest borders and watched
over the flocks and the outlying farms had been reduced from thirty to ten, and it had been three
or four years since they'd had a skirmish with anyone; the flow of hungry refugees and marauders
and aimless migrants had mostly stopped by now-dead, or else they'd found a place of their own.
These days the Outriders were more concerned with animals. The black bears and grizzlies were back
in the
mountains and the nearby hills, and for the past four or five years there had been wolves again,
coming back from who-knew-where, increasing steadily in numbers and becoming more of a threat as
the winters hardened. Visitors down from Jackman Station, in Maine, brought a story that a
mountain lion had recently been sighted on the slopes of White Cap, in the unsettled country
"north of the Moosehead," although before the War there couldn't have been any pumas left closer
_than Colorado or British Columbia. It had taken only twenty years.
There was a strange wagon in front of the old warehouse that was now the Outriders' station, a rig
Jamie had never seen before. It was an ordinary enough wagon, but it was painted. It was painted
in mad streaks and strips and random patchwork splotches of a dozen different colors-deep royal
blue, vivid yellow, scarlet, purple, earthbrown, light forest-green, black, burnt orange-as if a
hundred children from prewar days had been at it with finger paint. To Jamie's eyes, accustomed to
the dull and faded tones of Northview's weatherbeaten old buildings, the streaks of color were so
brilliant that they seemed to vibrate and stand out in raised contrast from the wagon's surface.
He was not used to seeing bright colors anymore, except those in the natural world around him, and
this paint was fresh, something he also hadn't seen in more years than he could remember. Even the
big horse, which stood patiently in the wagon's traces-and which now rolled an incurious eye up at
Jamie and blew out its lips with a blubbery snorting sound-even the horse was painted, blue on one
side, bright green on the other, with orange streaks up its flanks.
Jamie goggled at all this, wondering if it could possibly be real or if it was one of the
"effects"-hallucinations, as even he understood-that he sometimes got during particularly bad



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