"Jack Williamson - The Firefly Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

THE FIREFLY TREE
by Jack Williamson
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Copyright ┬й 1997 by Jack Williamson
Reprinted in Year's Best SF 3
HarperPrism
ISBN 0-06-105901-3

eBook scanned & proofed by binwiped 11-10-02 [v1.0]




They had come back to live on the old farm where his grandfather was born. His father loved it,
but he felt lonely for his friends in the city. Cattle sometimes grazed through the barren sandhills
beyond the barbed wire fences, but there were no neighbors. He found no friends except the
firefly tree.
It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather had planted below the house. His mouth
watered for the ripe apples and peaches and pears he expected, but when he saw the trees they
were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.
With no friends at all, he stayed with his father on the farm when his mother drove away
every morning to work at the peanut mill. His father was always busy in the garden he made
among the bare trees in the orchard. The old windmill had lost its wheel, but there was an electric
pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of
tomatoes and beans, and then the corn that grew tall enough to hide the money trees.
His mother fretted that they might cause trouble. Once he heard her call them marijuana. His
father quickly hushed her. The word was strange to him but he never asked what it meant because
he saw his father didn't like it.
He found the firefly tree one day while his father was chopping weeds and moving the pipes
that sprayed water on his money trees. It was still tiny then, not as tall as his knee. The leaves
were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely flower had
three wide sky-colored petals and a bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the ground by it,
breathing its strange sweetness, till his father came by with the hoe.
"Don't hurt it!" he begged. "Please!"
"That stinking weed?" his father grunted. "Get out of the way."
Something made him reach to catch the hoe.
"Okay." His father grinned and let it stay. "If you care that much."
He called it his tree, and watched it grow. When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found a
bucket and carried water from the well. It grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the great blue
flowers and then a hundred. The odor of them filled the garden.
Since there was no school, his mother tried to teach him at home. She found a red-backed
reader for him, and a workbook with pages for him to fill out while she was away at work. He
seldom got the lessons done.
"He's always mooning over that damn weed," his father muttered when she scolded him.
"High as a kite on the stink of it."
 The odor was strange and strong, but no stink at all. Not to him. He loved it and loved the
tree. He carried more water and used the hoe to till the soil around it. Often he stood just looking
at the huge blue blooms, wondering what the fruit would be.
One night he dreamed that the tree was swarming with fireflies. They were so real that he got
out of bed and slipped out into the dark. The stars blazed brighter here than they had ever been in