"James Patrick Kelly - St. Theresa of the Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

I wanted Nicole so much that I convinced myself that she was nothing
like her dour cousin. We were in love; I thought that was enough to make a
successful marriage. After school, we moved to Wynnewood, a suburb of
Philadelphia, and each of us found interesting work. I became a staff writer
and then an editor for InfoLine, one of the information utilities on telelink.
Often as not I worked from my home terminal and had supper ready for Nicole
when she came home from her job teaching history at Lower Marion High School.
Our world was very small; it included just the two of us. We watched a lot of
telelink and smoked hybrid pot that we grew ourselves and planted flower
gardens and played pacball and drank daiquiris in video bars; all the soothing
frivolities of life that people like Terry had no use for. It seemed to both
of us that we were happy.
But Terry would not leave us alone. Our affluence offended her,
although she was not at all shy about asking for money for her causes. Our
indifference offended her more. She visited often and insisted on giving us
her "reports from the real world," as she called them, tales of hunger and
decadence and corruption. I can see her now, sitting on the modular couch in
our living room, holding forth with quiet intensity about some misfit whose
soul she coveted for the Lord.
"Thirteen years old." She would rub the crucifix hanging around her
neck with thumb and forefinger. "She earns two hundred dollars a night and
she needs every cent of it to pay for screamers. The only adults she knows are
the johns; her only god comes out of a needle. And they call it a victimless
crime. Your senator is cosponsoring the bill, Sam. You're in telelink; can't
you do anything?"
Somehow, it was always my fault. By this time Nicole would have been
spiritually battered into a corner of the couch. She would clutch knees to
chest and nod, nod, nod, eyes blank. My best move would be to steer the
conversation onto a more cheery topic. "What ever happened to so-and-so?" I
would say, or "What should we watch tonight?" or "Where should we go for
supper?" I did not mind sounding like a fool; I thought I was protecting
Nicole.
Often as not Terry would ignore these gambits and continue on with her
condemnations of the monsters who had inflicted modern civilization on the
world. Once, though, she turned on me in a fury. "Sam, don't you realize that
you could get in your fancy car right now, drive downtown and find people
starving? What difference does it make to them if you can't order the Marx
Brothers on the goddamned telelink?"
"People are born to die." I should have realized when she took the
Lord's name in vain that she was out of control. I should have excused myself
and spent a few minutes in the bathroom washing my hands. I did not. "God
made them that way," I said.
She sighed. It was a sigh that acknowledged that I was the enemy but
because God commanded it she would forgive me.
I did not much care to be condescended to in my own living room.
"Everything is so simple, isn't it? If only the immoral louts like me would
wake up and see the light. If only we would stop writing news, building
cities, designing new computers. If only we would tear it all down and bring
back the Middle Ages so that everybody in the world was Catholic and wretched
together. Solidarity of misery, that's the ticket! Then maybe we could all