"Geoff Ryman - Home - v 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

So. I bolted my door, and I went Home.
It is vaguely embarrassing. I expect I smiled to myself, slightly guilty, slightly ashamed, like those people gawking at corpses. Rigging myself up in all the gear, as though I were auditioning for a part in Terminator II Better than the muck they put on these days, it's all like old Shirley Temple movies to me. I slip on the spectacles and I put on the boots and the gloves, and then I'm off Home.
Village near Witney, Oxfordshire, 1954. Church bells. The elms have not all died of disease, so there are banks of them, huge, high, billowing Re clouds and squawking with rookeries. And all the Cotswold stone houses are lined up with thatched roofs and crooked windows in which sit Delft vases, and the Home Service is playing music so sensible it almost smells of toasted white bread. There used to be a country called England. I'm not the one who remembers this it, though I was there. My bones remember it.
And I knock on a door and say "Good morning, Mrs. Clavell, is Kimberly there, please?" and then out comes my friend Kim.
Same age as me. We've taken recently to looking as we actually are, old fools. Kim has some snow-white hair left and his cheeks are mapped with purple veins. But we're wearing shorts and we can climb trees. We can climb to the pinnacle of the old ruined abbey, and there is no one guarding it and no one charging admission. No son et lumiere for Japanese tourists. And do you know? Hardly even a ritual killing. It's ours.
Kim moved to California, and became both rich and poor at the same time as is the way in California, always about to make a film. He's even worse off than I am now, in some home, without another friend in the world, in someone else's country. But he's Home now.

We take the shortcut, through the fields, past the hall. Here, the safe passages are ours, all the way to the river.