"Jo Walton - Tradition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

"Why do you cut the end off that way? It's good meat, it seems to me."

"Oh honey, it's just a thing you have to do with ham. I don't know why. I do it because that's
what my mother showed me how to do. Maybe you ought to ask her."

At that moment, Cleo, Maud's mother, who lived in Fools Gold and had come early for the
party, came into the kitchen looking for a drink. "Do you know why you cut the end off ham?"
Walter asked her.

Cleo poured herself a drink and looked down her nose at Walter. "Did you never see
anyone do that before?" she asked. "Well, I suppose it isn't surprising. I don't know exactly
what it's for, but that's the way my mother taught me how to do it."

The next day as they were eating their dinner, Walter remembered about the ham. He was
feeling quite stubborn about it by now. He was an engineer, and it didn't make sense to him.
He wasn't ashamed of having no family, and he refused to feel that way. He went up to his
grandmother-in-law, Alyssanne, who had never quite approved of him, and he asked about
the ham. At first she tried to put him off, but at last she admitted that she didn't know the
purpose of it either. "My mother used to cut the end off, so I do it."

Now Britney, Maud's great-grandmother, wasn't at the Landing Day party. She was old and
sick, on the end of her life-extension treatments, and she lived in a retirement community
over at Johnson Bay. The next time Maud and Walter took the kids over to see her, Walter
was glad to have something to talk to her about as she sat in her rocker staring out across
the aubergine waves.

"There's something I was wondering," he said.

Britney turned her head to look at him. She was so old that she had almost no hair and her
eyes were hard to see in all the wrinkles. She still had a lovely smile. "What's that, Walter?"
she asked.

"When you cook a whole ham, for the Landing Day party, why do you cut the end off before
cooking it? Maud said she did it because Cleo did, and Cleo said she did it because
Alyssanne did, and Alyssanne said she did it because you did. I know I'm a tank kid and
don't have any family traditions of my own, so I'm kind of interested in Maud's, and this
seems strange because it's good meat and it doesn't make sense."

Britney rocked a moment, and then she said, "You know, I'm glad you asked me that
question. I was born from a tank myself, and my whole generation, as you know. The thing is,
when the ship first landed we only had what we'd brought from Earth, before we got the
Mufug Plant set up, and even then, it could only make certain things, not like today. So when
I was growing up, in the orphanage, and when I was first married we didn't have any dishes
big enough to take a whole ham, so we used to cut the end off to fit in the dish."

And Walter laughed, and Britney smiled her sweet smile, and Maud laughed, and Arabetsy,
who was the only one of the children old enough to understand, laughed until she almost fell
off the balcony into the sea.
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