"Richard Wadholm - From Here You Can See The Sunquists" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wadholm Richard)

From Here You Can
See the Sunquists

By Richard Wadholm




Originally published in

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine




Part One



All that summer the Sunquists debated a trip to La Jet├йe.



Mr. Sunquist said that summer was the time to go. The tourists would be off to Kleege's
Beach, where the hotels were new and no one worried about slipping back and forth in
time as they walked down the beach. The Sunquists would have La Jet├йe to themselves.



Mrs. Sunquist was plainly uneasy about La Jet├йe. She would not say why. The Sunquists
were travelers, after all. Cosmopolitans. They savored a difficult aesthetic experience.



She spoke only of their neighbors, the Dales, who had spent a month in Nepal. "They
seemed so happy," she said. "They had their own sherpas. They rode in a cart up to
Annapurna, pulled by a team of yetis."



Mr. Sunquist wondered at her reluctance. Was she worried for the baby? He knew she
was nervous. Mrs. Sunquist had the sort of nerves that only a mid-life pregnancy can
bring on. But women had babies in La Jet├йe all the time. Some women spent their entire
pregnancies there. Mr. Sunquist proposed nothing more than a week? a farewell to the
city of their youth. What could that hurt?
He plied his wife with nostalgia. He reminded her of their first meeting, in the galleries
along Gull Street. Mr. Sunquist had purchased mangoes at Sonny's Seafood Chowder Bar
and shown her how to eat them with salt and cayenne pepper.