"Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

"Light of Other Days" is one of the three short stories that
tied for first place in the penultimate ballot. Its author, Bob
Shaw, is a newspaper reporter who has sold a small but steady
stream of tales to the science fiction maga;.ines. He confesses
he is addicted to puns and whiskeyand the "e" in that
"whiskey" goes toward revealing something of his origins; for
Bob Shaw is a sturdy Irishman in his mid-thirties, Belfast
born and bred. He is married and has three children. He says
he admires the writing of Lawrence Durrell; the only science
fiction writer he will commit himself to naming is Anthony
Burgess. Though by no means as prolific a writer as Burgess,
Shaw is now working on his first novel, which has been
contracted for by Avon.

LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

Bob Shaw

Leaving the village behind, we followed the heady sweeps of
the road up into a land of slow glass,
I had never seen one of the farms before and at first found
them slightly eeriean effect heightened by imagination and
circumstance. The car's turbine was pulling smoothly and
quietly in the damp air so that we seemed to be carried over
the convolutions of the road in a kind of supernatural silence.
On our right the mountain sifted down into an incredibly
perfect valley of timeless pine, and everywhere stood the great
frames of slow glass, drinking light. An occasional flash of
afternoon sunlight on their wind bracing created an illusion of
movement, but in fact the frames were deserted. The rows of
windows had been standing on the hillside for years, staring
into the valley, and men only cleaned them in the middle of
the night when their human presence would not matter to the
thirsty glass.
They were fascinating, but Selina and I didn't mention the
windows. I think we hated each other so much we both were
reluctant to sully anything new by drawing it into the nexus of
our emotions. The holiday, I had begun to realize, was a
stupid idea in the first place. I had thought it would cure
everything, but, of course, it didn't stop Selina being pregnant
and, worse still, it didn't even stop her being angry about
being pregnant.
Rationalizing our dismay over her condition, we had circu-
lated the usual statements to the effect that we would have
liked having childrenbut later .on, at the proper time.
Selina's pregnancy had cost us her well-paid job and with it
the new house we had been negotiating for and which was far
beyond the reach of my income from poetry. But the real
source of our annoyance was that we were face to face with