"Ian Watson - Early, In The Evening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

was actually dead. Didn't he realise this? The woman's logic had eluded
Richard, so he had put the phone down.
Elisabeth soon stopped fretting. Richard glanced at his watch. A few more
blithe hours remained. Once Paul and Sally had departed homeward, and
after the twins were in bed, perhaps he and his wife might make love.
What if Elisabeth became pregnant? Could a baby ever grow in her womb and
be born after another two hundred and seventy recapitulative days? Would
such a newcomer be born in a modern hospital or in a medieval hut?
Had any babies been born recently? Father Hopkins might know. Richard
found within himself no desire to ask the priest. Nor, any longer, did he
find desire itself.
From the kitchen he fetched a final chilled bottle of the dry Muscadet
which the friends favoured. Tomorrow evening, he must stop by the
supermarket to restock.
"Here's to another day," he proposed.

"Do you remember ice-boxes?" Richard asked Beth in their home of mud and
wattle as two candle stubs burned low. He freed the skirt of his tunic
from his belt so as to hide the twice-darned tops of hose tied to his
waist-band. "Do you remember moving pictures from far away in a box with a
glass front? Do you remember voices from a box?"
His wife, in her ankle-length skirt and large apron, frowned in the
flickery gloom. "Why we wasting the candles, Rich?"
Would she pull the caul from her head and let down her braids while he
could still behold her?
"Do you remember machines?" he persisted.
"Is this another of your visions?" she asked dolefully. "Maybe you ought
to speak to the monk instead of to me."
"What were we doing this morning, Beth?"
Anxiety haunted her.
"Our tribe," she mumbled. "We was hiding from those soldiers of Rome. Your
face was daubed with blue. Life's much better these days."
"That was at noontime, Beth. What were we doing earlier?"
Surely they had worn skins and chipped flints to fix to trimmed poles,
around a fire in a cave mouth in the cold? Surely the shaman, who was now
the monk, had imparted a vision of carts and hayricks?
"We ought to be abed, Rich!"

In the evening, as the light died, fire was finally tamed. The flash from
the sky which had burned the pine tree re-awoke from embers to set piled
branches ablaze and banish the hungry bear.
The shaman chanted about light being reborn with the dawn. What was that
dawn -- which those of the tribe could only recall in fleeting dreamlike
spasms? Earlier in the day surely they had shared the life of some small
hairy animal which was not their totem animal, the huge-horned elk. They
had surely themselves been beasts.
"Lis-ba!" Dik demanded of his wizened mate. "Wa Ma?"
He wanted to know where was their child of countless summers, now herself
swollen with child. Dik's last few rotting teeth were aching. Soon he
would be the oldest man around.