"Goonan, Kathleen Ann - The Day The Dam Broke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

rest. I will not keep you if you do not want to stay. I am not kidding about the
animals but you know as well as I that they are the least of your worries.
Injury and plague would do you in first, statistically speaking, if my antidotes
did not take and it has been so very long I suspect that they did not. But there
are other reasons you might not come, I suppose.
On the wooden porch I turn and look inside: see? A red plaid blanket flung over
the couch, I can be concrete if you so insist, a teal-green chair the color of
Passo Lake, two hundred feet below (a favored color at the Pointed Fir). Fire
flickers orange and blue inside the arched glass window of the cast-iron stove,
and I am cooking soybean soup upon it. Don't wrinkle your nose. It's delicious.
Cedar planks with staring golden eyes warm and complete me, almost. So easy to
find, precision itself, if you know how to read so to speak. And I have the cure
for all Plagues, and for many of the things which cause aging (they even seem to
work on G.E. and Mildred, which surprises the heck out of me), which I will
administer if you are kind, but it cannot make you kind, that is something only
the cocoons could do which is why I must be careful. Please make sure you are
kind before you come all this way. One of you will feel kindness as a great
change, a lifting of darkness. The other will feel unchanged. You knew that I
had the cures long ago, so long ago, more's the pity. If things worked out,
though, you have them now. I tried to administer them before I sheeted you,
amidst the panic of the dam breaking, but as you may or may not remember, you
destroyed whatever you could of them. Out of simple pique. One of you did, and
you know which one of course. I'm not trying to start an argument here. I'm
apologizing for not understanding the dynamics better. But I don't think that
either of you understood them so why should I?
I have plenty of coffee, by the way, from the Pointed Fir Lodge. The supply will
run out eventually, but Alice was ready for a blockbuster season.
#
And so the train reached Columbus. We stopped in Cincinnati dome and left
fifteen cars but I did not get off the train; I had been warned against it as
Cincinnati was on a slightly different system than L.A. which might kill me or
at the very least make me sick. I heard rumors that their dome would not be
there much longer; they had thought out an undomed system. Bravo, I said, not
believing. But I had been immunized for undomed Columbus and Columbus only,
though I had 6 clearance which meant protection for me--if it held, which was
doubtful. The 6 guaranteed immuni zation wherever I went it was only a matter of
verification and then the proper sheets supplied by local authorities. But that
presupposed, of course, the existence of local authorities, and the definition
of proper sheets had become by that time loose, had most likely drifted. I was
out in the wilderness on my own and I relished that.
What a joke all that folderol was! For in Columbus--but why complain about what
happened there? You gave me the maps which brought me here, beneath the diamond
skies I bonded to once I got far enough north, have you seen the Pleiades? They
are my favor ite the Seven Sisters my very Sisters though I know well enough
they are just radio waves, glowing gas, the artifacts of our birth whose light
only exists. The stars toward which You may travel, any one of you, if you wake
and stretch in some other age, and if you are so misguided as to travel through
space instead of coming here, may well have not been born. Or may have died long
ago.
How strange.