"Walter Jon Williams - Daddy's World (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"Where are Momma and Daddy?" Jamie wailed.
"They're fine," Selena said. "They're asleep in their room. Was it a bad dream?"
Jamie threw off the covers and leaped out of bed. He ran down the hall, the floorboards cool on his bare feet. Selena floated after him in her serene, concerned way. He threw open the door to his parents' bedroom and snapped on the light, then gave a cry as he saw them huddled beneath their blanket. He flung himself at his mother, and gave a sob of relief as she opened her eyes and turned to him.
"Something wrong?" Momma said. "Was it a bad dream?"
"_No!_" Jamie wailed. He tried to explain, but even he knew that his words made no sense. Daddy rose from his pillow, looking seriously at Jamie, and then turned to ruffle his hair.
"Sounds like a pretty bad dream, trouper," Daddy said. "Let's get you back to bed."
"_No!_" Jamie buried his face in his mother's neck. "I don't want to go back to bed!"
"All right, Jamie," Momma said. She patted Jamie's back. "You can sleep here with us. But just for tonight, okay?"
"Wanna stay here," Jamie mumbled.
He crawled under the covers between Momma and Daddy. They each kissed him, and Daddy turned off the light. "Just go to sleep, trouper," he said. "And don't worry. You'll only have only good dreams from now on."
Selena, faintly glowing in the darkness, sat silently in the corner. "Shall I sing?" she asked.
"Yes, Selena," Daddy said. "Please sing for us."
The birds have tucked their heads, Selena began to sing,
>>>The night is dark and deep
All is quiet, all is safe,
And little Jamie goes to sleep.<<<
But Jamie did not sleep. Despite the singing, the dark night, the rhythmic breathing of his parents and the comforting warmth of their bodies.
It _wasn't_ a dream, he knew. His family had really been frozen.
Something, or someone, had turned them to stone. Probably that evil disembodied head and pair of hands. And now, for some reason, his parents didn't remember.
Something had made them forget.
Jamie stared into the darkness. What, he thought, if these _weren't_ his parents? If his parents were still stone, hidden away somewhere? What if these substitutes were bad people -- kidnappers or worse -- people who just _looked_ like his real parents. What if they were evil people who were just waiting for him to fall asleep, and then they would turn to monsters, with teeth and fangs and a horrible light in their eyes, and they would tear him to bits right here in the bed...
Talons of panic clawed at Jamie's heart. Selena's song echoed in his ears. He _wasn't_ going to sleep! He _wasn't!_
And then he did. It wasn't anything like normal sleep -- it was as if sleep was _imposed_ on him, as if something had just _ordered_ his mind to sleep. It was just like a wave that rolled over him, an irresistible force, blotting out his senses, his body, his mind...
I _won't_ sleep! he thought in defiance, but then his thoughts were extinguished.
When he woke he was back in his own bed, and it was morning, and Mister Jeepers was floating outside the window. "Jamie's awake!" he sang. "Jamie's awake and ready for a new day!"
And then his parents came bustling in, kissing him and petting him and taking him downstairs for breakfast.
His fears seemed foolish now, in full daylight, with Mister Jeepers dancing in the air outside and singing happily.
But sometimes, at night while Selena crooned by his bedside, he gazed into the darkness and felt a thrill of fear.
And he never forgot, not entirely.
* * * *
A few days later Don Quixote wandered into the world, a lean man who frequently fell off his lean horse in a clang of home-made armor. He was given to making wan comments in both English and his own language, which turned out to be Spanish.
"Can you teach me Spanish irregular verbs?" Jamie asked.
"_Si, naturalmente,_" said Don Quixote. "But I will have to teach you some other Spanish as well." He looked particularly mournful. "Let's start with _corazon._ It means 'heart.' _Mi corazon_," he said with a sigh, "is breaking for love of Dulcinea."
After a few sessions with Don Quixote -- mixed with a lot of sighing about _corazons_ and Dulcinea -- Jamie took a grip on his courage, marched up to El Castillo, and spoke to La Duchesa. "_Pierdo, suenyo, haria, ponto!_" he cried.
La Duchesa's eyes widened in surprise, and as she bent toward Jamie her severe face became almost kindly. "You are obviously a very intelligent boy," she said. "You may enter my castle."
And so Don Quixote and La Duchesa, between the two of them, began to teach Jamie to speak Spanish. If he did well, he was allowed into the parts of the castle where the musicians played and the dancers stamped, where brave Castilian knights jousted in the tilting yard, and Senyor Esteban told stories in Spanish, always careful to use words that Jamie already knew.
Jamie couldn't help but notice that sometimes Don Quixote behaved strangely. Once, when Jamie was visiting the Whirlikins, Don Quixote charged up on his horse, waving his sword and crying out that he would save Jamie from the goblins that were attacking him. Before Jamie could explain that the Whirlikins were harmless, Don Quixote galloped to the attack. The Whirlikins, alarmed, screwed themselves into the ground where they were safe, and Don Quixote fell off his horse trying to swing at one with his sword. After poor Quixote fell off his horse a few times, it was Jamie who had to rescue the Don, not the other way around.
It was sort of sad and sort of funny. Every time Jamie started to laugh about it, he saw Don Quixote's mournful face in his mind, and his laugh grew uneasy.
After a while, Jamie's sister Becky began to share Jamie's lessons. She joined him and Princess Gigunda on the trip to the little schoolhouse, learned reading and math from Mrs. Winkle, and then, after some coaching from Jamie and Don Quixote, she marched to La Duchesa to shout irregular verbs and gain entrance to the El Castillo.
Around that time Marcus Tullius Cicero turned up to take them both to the Forum Romanum, a new part of the world that had appeared to the south of the Whirlikins' territory. But Cicero and the people in the Forum, all the shopkeepers and politicians, did not teach Latin the way Don Quixote taught Spanish, explaining what the new words meant in English, they just talked Latin at each other and expected Jamie and Becky to understand. Which, eventually, they did. The Spanish helped. Jamie was a bit better at Latin than Becky, but he explained to her that it was because he was older.
It was Becky who became interested in solving Princess Gigunda's problem. "We should find her somebody to love," she said.
"She loves _us_," Jamie said.
"Don't be silly," Becky said. "She wants a _boyfriend._"
"_I'm_ her boyfriend," Jamie insisted.
Becky looked a little impatient. "Besides," she said, "it's a puzzle. Just like La Duchesa and her verbs."
This had not occurred to Jamie before, but now that Becky mentioned it, the idea seemed obvious. There were a lot of puzzles around, which one or the other of them was always solving, and Princess Gigunda's lovelessness was, now that he saw it, clearly among them.
So they set out to find Princess Gigunda a mate. This question occupied them for several days, and several candidates were discussed and rejected. They found no answers until they went to the chariot race at the of the Circus Maximus. It was the first race in the Circus ever, because the place had just appeared on the other side of the Palatine Hill from the Forum, and there was a very large, very excited crowd.
The names of the charioteers were announced as they paraded their chariots to the starting line. The trumpets sounded, and the chariots bolted from the star as the drivers whipped up the horses. Jamie watched enthralled as they rolled around the _spina_ for the first lap, and then shouted in surprise at the sight of Don Quixote galloping onto the Circus Maximus, shouting that he was about to stop this group of rampaging demons from destroying the land, and planted himself directly in the path of the oncoming chariots. Jamie shouted along with the crowd for the Don to get out of the way before he got killed.
Fortunately Quixote's horse had more sense than he did, because the spindly animal saw the chariots coming and bolted, throwing its rider. One of the chariots rode right over poor Quixote, and there was a horrible clanging noise, but after the chariot passed, Quixote sat up, apparently unharmed. His armor had saved him.
Jamie jumped from his seat and was about to run down to help Don Quixote off the course, but Becky grabbed his arm. "Hang on," she said, "Someone else will look after him, and I have an idea."