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

When I talk about delusions spreading, it's only by accident that I mean now instead of then. I think. It's
hard to be certain when you're talking to yourself. Or when you think you're talking to yourself.

I forgot how cold it is here.
├Дt
To me it's just a sun, but I was only three when the Susan Constant left Earth in 2067. Which makes me
two hundred and three years old, but if you ask me my age I'll tell you I'm nineteen.

I should be seventeen. I should never have had to spend two years alone on Susan Constant, ghosting
around in the four rooms heated to sustain life. The ship was always cold; even when I was on Canaan I
was cold all the time because when you've spent two years feeling a chill it never quite goes away. I miss
lying in that sun even though it's not the right sun. I miss lying in the grass even though it wasn't the right
grass. I miss Iris.

Because my old man was a Volunteer.
├Дt
If you'd known him in Grant City, if someone had pointed out the thin bearded guy with the whining
exoskeletal supports and a tendency to stare off at the sky while mumbling to himself and said, "That's the
guy they got to keep Evelyn on an even keel," you would have thought to yourself that it was a miracle
anybody survived the trip. And it was. Out of two thousand colonists, four hundred and thirty-two lived
to see Canaan. That was because of my father.

It was also because of him that the others died.
├Дt
You cannot ignore this. Listen to me.
├Дt
I think I fell in something like love the first time Iris Flynn came up and talked to me in the cemetery. I
was walking away from my mother's grave, confused and a bit dislocated like always, and she was
coming up the road walking a brown puppy that chased after the big dragonfly-like insects that buzzed up
from the river behind the cemetery. "Hi," she said.

I said hi.

"You're Wiley, right?"

There was no point denying it. "Yeah," I said, and waited for her to make some remark about how lucky
I was. As if we weren't all lucky.

She pointed off to my right. "My sister's over there."

There was a long uncomfortable moment. Then I said, "I'm sorry."

Iris smiled at me. "It's not your fault."
Bang. Dead. After that moment, I would have done anything to be with her.

When I got home, my dad was sitting on a bench in front of one of the dozen barracks-style buildings
that housed the citizens of Grant City. Across the new road, a work crew was welding I-beams to frame
an apartment building. The pace of construction had picked up now that we'd gotten an oil well pumping
for plastics and a smelter for good steel, but Grant City as it stood was still only the row of barracks, the
school house, a shuttle pad already sprouting cracks, the bio lab, and a cluster of tech buildings at a