"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

"Yup," I told her, smiling, sitting down on the bed now and patting her hand because I couldn't think of
anything else to do, any other way to connect. God, but it drained me to visit here. Momma used to be
smart, used to be able to talk backwards and write backwards and figure out which flavor of syrup
would take the rust off an iron tile. She'd gotten us through the Evacuation, the whole family, by drawing
the right conclusions and jumping at the right time and somehow making a grand adventure of it all. But
then Avery had died in a bloom, and Patrice in a fire, and then my father simply failed to wake up one
morning, and a little more had gone out of her each time. Sick. Momma was sick, and gradually getting
sicker, and I'd taken much too long to figure it out. Sometimes I thought she was dead already, an empty
shell of flesh and nerve, speaking only in echoes. How long ago should I have said goodbye?

"Momma," I said to her then, in a strong voice that I hoped would penetrate, "I have to go away for a
while. I have to go on a trip, and I won't be able to see you while I'm gone. I can send messages, though,
and you can send messages back."

She seemed to consider my words.

"I can talk to the staff about it," I went on slowly. "I know you don't like the zee-spec, but that's okay; I
can send you a plaintext or an audio mail, and someone can play it for you. And you can reply, if you
want to."

She was nodding, looking thoughtful, but the hand she raised was an instruction to silence. "Do you
remember your father's accident?" she asked, a wise, distant glint in her eyes. "Wild parrots. He drove up
into the mountains, and wild parrots ate his windshield wipers. Heaven knows, but those parrots have a
serious appetite for rubber, and when he was driving back down, it rained and he couldn't see, and he
crashed. Drove right into a tree, I think, though it may have been a rock."

"I remember. It was a road sign he hit."

Her brown eyes caught mine, held them. She was smiling. "I told him, man, you might have been the first
person in the history of the world to ever be killed by parrots. What a funny thing that was. Killed by
parrots, can you imagine? But he lived a long time after that. A long time. He used to love to tell that
story."

Yes, indeed he did. There had been a lot more to it, back then, though the exact details had tended to
wander from one telling to the next. My father had been a systems analyst, "long for handyman" as he'd
liked to say, though the Immunity had put him to work making shoes, same as me. "Shoes are important
in low gravity," he'd often said, "and not so easy to make well."

"Arthur always loved the mountains," Momma went on, smiling fondly. "And the animals, and the sky.
We didn't Evacuate many animals with us, did we? Of course there wasn't much timeтАФit's hard to blame
us when the hills around the spaceport were literally dissolving but I don't think your father was ever
really happy after we left. He was never really the same."

Yeah, losing a whole planetтАФand later a whole inner solar systemтАФcan do that to you. Hence the love
even nowтАФperhaps especially nowтАФof that damned parrot story. See here, we really knew the Earth
in our time there. I sighed. "Momma, we can talk about Dad if you want, but first I want you to listen to
me. I have to go away. I have to go on a trip. Are you listening? Do you understand what I'm saying?
Momma?"