"Paul J. McAuley - Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Inheritance
a novelette by Paul J McAuley

There was no doubt about it: he was lost.
Robert Tolley crumpled the map with an abrupt motion and levered
himself
out of the rented Volkswagen -- no easy task, for he was a tall man
running to fat, and the seat low-slung -- to get a better look at his
surroundings. He had parked the car in an embayment before a gate in
the
hedgerow, so that he wouldn't block the narrow, unmarked road. Now, he
lit
a cigarette and leaned against the old-fashioned stile, looked across
the
rough meadow, and wondered if he shouldn't simply abandon the search
and
turn back to Oxford.
A fine rain hung in the air, the kind, slightly too heavy to be a mist,
that the English called a mizzle. Quaint, like calling an elevator a
lift,
or fall autumn, or the way the peppy red Volkswagen was called a Golf
rather than a Rabbit. Like, but not like. The way the fields, vividly
green even at the beginning of December, were subtly different from the
New Hampshire pastures of his childhood.
Tolley was about to climb back in the car when he saw two figures leave
the cover of trees in the far corner of the field and start across it.
A
dog's bark lifted across the grass, flat-sounding in the damp air, and
the
animal, a black-and-white collie, reached him before its owners,
wriggling
under the gate and dancing about, barking. Tolley shifted back uneasily
and murmured, "Good boy, good boy," afraid that it would jump up
against
his new Burberry, or worse.
One of the walkers, a man, climbed the stile and called to the dog.
"Don't
fret," he told Tolley. His voice was thick with some northern accent.
"He
doesn't bite."
"Maybe you can help me," Tolley said. "I guess I'm a little lost."
"Ask away." He was a wiry man of about sixty, a chequered cap pulled
low
over springy white hair, an expensive camera slung over the shoulder of
his Norfolk jacket. He turned and held his wife's hand as she clambered
over the stile -- at least, Tolley guessed that she was his wife, a
small
woman a few years younger than her husband, around Tolley's age. Her
glossy black hair was bound back in a girlish ponytail, and a silk
scarf