"Jo Walton - Unreliable Witness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

and speaks in French. I think this is a blind meant to put me off. Richard had the
grace to look uncomfortable when they shuffled me into this place and stole my
books. Oh, they'd already replaced them with ones with wriggling letters, all but
the ones where the print was too small to read even with strong glasses. But I
liked to have them around me. Kim understood. She picked out a pile of my
favourites and brought them in for me when her parents weren't there. She
brought me this tape-recorder and some books on tape. It's not the same, but
by God, it's better than nothing. She's a good girl, and she knows what I like to
read. That's more than Richard does. Dick Francis, he brought me. When did I
ever read Dick Francis? All about horses. Well.


"I taught you to read myself," I said, "and now you're taking my books away."


"You won't have room for them, Mum," he said, looking down, sideways,
anywhere but at me. "You'll have your television. You like your television."


Well, yes, television, good enough in its way. Full of rubbish but it doesn't talk to
me as if I'm a three-year-old, or as if I've suddenly split into twins. "How are we
today?" I can't bear that. At least it's something else, people talking, stories, and
nobody's managed to steal it from me yet. They do steal the remote so that I'm
stuck on a channel I don't want and miss The X-Files.


The X-Files. Yes. The alien. Tom. He pretended to be a kid at first, but I was
suspicious straight away. As soon as I outright asked him if he was an alien he
admitted it.


"How did you learn our language?" I asked him.


"From TV." He shrugged. He sounded sort of American, with an accent that
didn't seem to come from anywhere in particular. "I never thought you'd guess,"
he said. "I thought it was a good disguise."


"You should have come as a doctor. We don't see kids in here often." At that
time I thought it was a better disguise than it was, that his real shape was fifty
foot high and green or something of that kind.


"Oh, but I could never have passed for an adult." When I looked sceptical, he
added, "It's only the outside that's the disguise."


"I don't believe it." I looked straight at him. "You mean there are a race of aliens
that look enough like us to pass? That's nonsense. I may look like a senile old