"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

Volunteers

by Alex Irvine

I have always had only one parent. Sometimes I can convince myself that I remember my mother
plucking nervously at her harness as gravity disappeared on our way to the moon, but it's probably a
capture from the vid archive. I think she must have seemed beautiful to me then, but so many video
images of her lie between me and that memory тАж I can't tell anymore.

Her grave is near the center of the cemetery carved out of the brushy forest that surrounds Grant City. I
visited it sometimes, and I tried to miss her, but she was too distant. Every time, I ended up back with my
father, sitting on the bench, trying to make something live between us.
├Дt
When you look up at the sky from Grant City, 47 Ursae Majoris doesn't look that different than Sol from
Earth. You have to have spex on to really compare, although some of the people who were older when
we left Earth spent a lot of time glancing sunward and then shaking their heads like something wasn't quite
right and they weren't sure what it was. That was where it all started, I think. Little puzzled glances at the
sun that wasn't what it should be.

By the time I was about eleven, though, things had gone much further off course.

This was about when I started wearing spex all the time. They belonged to my father, and I put them on
just to imitate the old man, who thought it was funny, and anyway James Brennan wasn't physically up to
doing any kind of work anymore, so he had no need of spex. So for a while I pretended to do what my
father had been doing, surveying and materials analysis; I hung around work sites and let myself become
a kind of mascot for the workers. They called me Flash Gordon and laughed at my imagination when I
asked them where all the robots had gone. Not too long after that, I started to notice that I was the only
kid in Grant City who wore spex all the time, and I started to like the way it made me feel different.

My teachers didn't like it. "Can you take off your glasses?" they'd ask, and I'd think, Glasses? My civics
teacher, Mr. Fulton, tried to take them away from me, but my dad made Fulton give them back. Civics.
We were on another planet learning about the bicameral legislature and the electoral college.

Kids started to call me Four-Eyes.

After a while, picking up on the same shit they were swallowing, I started to tell them that four eyes were
better than two. Verbal judo: use their weight against them. Also I had already figured out that I wasn't
doing myself any favors by calling attention to the fact that it wasn't 1956.
├Дt
There really were robots when I was a little kid. Blocky things on six wheels, with jointed arms ending in
flat pincers. The adults called them lobsters, so we kids did, too. I was fifteen before I knew that lobster
wasn't just a slang term for robot.

When you're a kid, you adapt to all kinds of insanity without thinking about it too much. Lack of
perspective gives you amazing resilience. So the day I went to school and saw chalkboards in the
classrooms, I didn't think much about it, especially when I discovered I could drive the teachers crazy by
making the chalk squeal. I was ten years old, and we had been on Canaan for five years. Plenty of time
for delusions to spread.
├Дt
I can't help it if I tell this story with a little too much ironic distance. Nobody can tell childhood straight.