"Kate Wilhelm - The Girl Who Fell into the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

looked like an inverted lake. There were hills, all grass-covered, the
grass gold, brown, ocher. She felt no breeze, yet the golden grass
responded to something that was like a shadow passing over it,
shading it, moving on, restoring the shining gold. As she stood
motionless, her gaze taking in the landscape, she began slowly to
make out other details: the grass ended at outcroppings of rock that
were also golden, or tan, ocher. There were rocky ridges outlining
hills in the distance, and now she saw that the grass was not the
lush carpet she had thought it to be at first. It was sparse, in places
yielding to the rocky ground, in a few places high and thick, but
there were few of those stands. And she could see paths winding
through the grass. Leading where? She hurried back inside, eager
to dress, have something quick to eat, and get back out to follow a
trail or two before the sun got much higher, before the heat
returned.


The drive across the state was as hot and tedious as John
MacLaren had known it would be. His father had had the truck
serviced, even had a new battery in it, but the monster was
thirteen years old and cranky. Although his father claimed it was
his hunting and fishing truck, actually he had bought it for hauling
pieces of furniture from barn sales, estate sales, garage sales. And
he had been willing to travel a thousand miles to attend such sales.
Not for the past five or six years, John thought then, not since a
heart attack had slowed him down a little, and he was glad again
that he was the one in the truck, and not his father. The fact that
the truck had been tuned up, the battery replaced, the tires checked
meant that his father had fully intended to take this trip himself.
He returned to the question that had bothered him all night: Why?
What was so damned important about one more piano, one more
antique?
There was something, he knew. CastlemanтАЩs death two weeks
ago had stirred a darkness in his father that usually was so deeply
buried that few people suspected its presence. John had sensed it
now and then, and had seen it only yesterday. He could almost envy
his father that, he thought bleakly. His own life had no secrets, no
past best left unexplored. He had married the girl most suitable for
him according to her family and his. An exemplary citizen, an
exemplary husband and father with no darkness in him, no crazy
hermit pal to beckon and stir the darkness that didnтАЩt exist anyway.
He knew the two old men had known each other for fifty years or
more, and had assumed that they never saw each other only
because Castleman had been a recluse, three hundred miles away,
and not entirely sane.
When John was fifteen, his father had taken him along when he
visited Castleman to draw up his will. Even then Castleman had
been a crank, raving incoherencies. John had stayed outside while
they talked, argued, yelled at each other in the end, and he was
certain that his father had not been back since that day; he himself