"Joanna Russ - When It Changed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russ Joanna)

When It Changed
by Joanna Russ


Katy drives like a maniac; we must have been doing over 120 km/hr on those
turns. She's good, though, extremely good, and I've seen her take the whole
car apart and put it together again in a day. My birthplace on Whileaway was
largely given to farm machinery and I refuse to wrestle with a five-gear shift
at unholy speeds, not having been brought up to it, but even on those turns in
the middle of the night, on a country road as bad as only our district can
make them, Katy's driving didn't scare me. The funny thing about my wife,
though: she will not handle guns. She has even gone hiking in the forests
above the 48th parallel without firearms, for days at a time. And that does
scare me.

Katy and I have three children between us, one of hers and two of mine.
Yuriko, my eldest, was asleep in the back seat, dreaming twelve-year-old
dreams of love and war: running away to sea, hunting in the North, dreams of
strangely beautiful people in strangely beautiful places, all the wonderful
guff you think up when you're turning twelve and the glands start going. Some
day soon, like all of them, she will disappear for weeks on end to come back
grimy and proud, having knifed her first cougar or shot her first bear,
dragging some abominably dangerous dead beastie behind her, which I will never
forgive for what it might have done to my daughter. Yuriko says Katy's driving
puts her to sleep.

For someone who has fought three duels, I am afraid of far, far too much. I'm
getting old. I told this to my wife.

"You're thirty-four," she said. Laconic to the point of silence, that one. She
flipped the lights on, on the dashтАФthree km to go and the road getting worse
all the time. Far out in the country. Electric-green trees rushed into our
headlights and around the car. I reached down next to me where we bolt the
carrier panel to the door and eased my rifle into my lap. Yuriko stirred in
the back. My height but Katy's eyes, Katy's face. The car engine is so quiet,
Katy says, that you can hear breathing in the back seat. Yuki had been alone
in the car when the message came, enthusiastically decoding her dot-dashes
(silly to mount a wide-frequency transceiver near an I.C. engine, but most of
Whileaway is on steam). She had thrown herself out of the car, my gangly and
gaudy offspring, shouting at the top of her lungs, so of course she had had to
come along. We've been intellectually prepared for this ever since the Colony
was founded, ever since it was abandoned, but this is different. This is
awful.

"Men!" Yuki had screamed, leaping over the car door. "They've come back! Real
Earth men!"