"Kristine Kathryn Rusch -- Recovering Apollo 8" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

The author's latest Retrieval Artist novel, Paloma, was published late last year by Roc and
she had stories in Analog and the North American Review around the same time. In her
latest tale for Asimov's, a man's life-long obsession becomes both his life story and the
story ofтАж

Recovering Apollo 8
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Asimov's Science Fiction
February, 2007


Part One: 2007


Richard remembered it wrong. He remembered it as if it were a paint-ing, and he were
observing it, instead of a living breathing memory that he had a part of.

The image was so vivid, in fact, that he had had it painted with the first of what would
become obscene profits from his business, and placed the painting in his officeтАФeach
version of his office, the latter ones growing so big that he had to find a special way to
display the painting, a way to help it remain the center of his vision.

The false memoryтАФand the paintingтАФwent like this:
He stands in his backyard. To his left, there is the swing set; to his right, clotheslines
running forward like railroad tracks.

He is eight, small for his age, very blond, his features unformed. His face is turned
toward the night sky, the Moon larger than it ever is. It il-luminates his face like a halo from a
medieval religious painting; its whiteness so vivid that it seems more alive than he does.
He, however, is not looking at the Moon. He is looking beyond it where a small
cone-shaped ship heads toward the darkness. The ship is almost invisible, except for one
edge that catches the Moon's reflected light. A shimmer comes off the ship, just enough to
make it seem as if the ship is expending its last bit of energy in a desperate attempt to save
itself, an attempt even heтАФat eightтАФknows will fail.

Someone once asked him why he had a painting about loss as the focus of his office.
He was stunned.
He did not think of the painting, or the memory for that matter, as something that
represented loss.
Instead, it represented hope. That last, desperate attempt would not have happened
without the hope that it might work.

That's what he used to say.
What he thought was that the hope resided in the boy, in his memory, and in his desire
to change one of the most significant moments of his past.
The real memory was prosaic:

The kitchen was painted bright yellow and small, although it didn't seem small then.
Behind his chair were the counters, cupboards and a deep sink with a small window above
it, a window that overlooked the sidewalk to the garage. To his left, two more windows