"Pohl, Frederik - Rem The Rememberer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

REM THE REMEMBERERREM THE REMEMBERER

br Frederik Pohl
Version 1.0


I don't much like writing "special occasion stories for particular purposes. To
be saddled with somebody else's theme or settings comports very poorly with the
undisciplined and stochastic way I think I am best able to write; so it's hard
work. If editors as a race had group awareness, they wouldn't ask me, either,
because all too often I have dutifully done what some editor asked me to do,
only to find about the time I finished the story that some higher-up had
canceled the special issue or the magazine or project itself; "Kiss of Death
Fred one editor called me, and she was at least in this respect right. This
story is one such. It represents one of my very few involvements with the United
Nations, specifically with UNICEF. I got a call from a man who said that UNICEF
had decided to publish a book of what the children of the next generation would
make of their world, in all the parts of the world the United Nations covered,
and would I care to write one for the United States? I could not say no. With
all its nasty and conspicuous faults, the United Nations has greatly bettered
the world we live in; and of all the things it does, UNICEF is the most clearly,
unequivocally good. So I wrote this story.., and hardly had I finished it when
the word came that high-level consultations had voted to torpedo the whole plan,
and the book would never appear.
Sometimes when Rememberer awoke in the morning he was crying. Not for long. Just
for a minute, out of a dream he didn't like. When his mother, Peg, heard him,
she came into his small, cheerful room and stood in the doorway, smiling at him
until she was sure he was altogether awake. She worried about him. He was ten
years old, and she thought he was too old for that. She gave him his breakfast
and sent him off to school on his bicycle. By then he was cheerful again.
In the afternoons he helped the grownups. When Peg was housecleaning, Rem mopped
and brushed and helped prepare the food. When Burt, his father, was working at
home on his analyses (Burt was something like a public accountant, in charge of
the Southern New York Regional energy budgets), Rem checked his figures on a
pocket calculator. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went out in catamarans with his
Uncle Marc to help harvest mussels from the Long Island Sound Nurseries. The
mussels grew on long, knotted manila lines that hung from floats. Each day
hundreds of cords had to be pulled up, and stripped of the grown mussels, and
reseeded with tiny mussel larvae, and put back in the water. It was hard work.
Rem was too small to handle pulling up the ropes, but he could strip and reseed,
and pick up the mussels that fell in the bottom of the boat so the men wouldn't
crush them with their feet, and generally be useful. It was tiring. But it felt
good to be tired after three hours in the catamaran, and the water was always
warm, even when the air coming down off Connecticut was blustery and cold. In
all but the worst weather Marc would wink and nod toward the side, and Rem would
skin out of his outer clothes and dive overboard and swim down among the
dangling cords, looking to see how the mussels were growing. Sometimes he took
an air-pack and his uncle or one of the other men came with him, and together
they would go clear down to the bottom to look for stray oysters or crabs or
even lobsters that had escaped from the pens out around Block Island.