"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

suppressed cinematic masterwork, The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin
. . . but that tale remains for another telling.

The present movie went on to mention the successful forays against the Brazilians at Panama during
Deklan Conqueror's reign, which may have struck closer to home, for I saw Julian wince once or twice.

As for me . . . I tried to lose myself in the moment, but my attention was woefully truant.

Perhaps it was the strangeness of the campaign event, so close to Christmas. Perhaps it was the
HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE, which I had been reading in bed, a page or two at a time,
almost every night since our journey to the Tip. Whatever the cause, I was beset by a sudden anxiety and
sense of melancholy. Here I was in the midst of everything that seemed familiar and ought to be
comfortingтАФthe crowd of the leasing class, the enclosing benevolence of the Dominion Hall, the banners
and tokens of the Christmas seasonтАФand it all felt suddenly ephemeral, as if the world were a bucket
from which the bottom had dropped out.

Perhaps this was what Julian had called "the philosopher's perspective." If so, I wondered how the
philosophers endured it. I had learned a little from Sam GodwinтАФand more from Julian, who read books
of which even Sam disapprovedтАФabout the discredited ideas of the Secular Era. I thought of Einstein,
and his insistence that no particular point of view of was more privileged than any other: in other words
his "general relativity," and its claim that the answer to the question "What is real?" begins with the
question "Where are you standing?" Was that all I was, here in the cocoon of Williams FordтАФa Point of
View? Or was I an incarnation of a molecule of DNA, "imperfectly remembering," as Julian had said, an
ape, a fish, and an amoeba?

Maybe even the Nation that Ben Kreel had praised so extravagantly was only an example of this
trend in natureтАФan imperfect memory of another century, which had itself been an imperfect memory of
all the centuries before it, and so back to the dawn of Man (in Eden, or Africa, as Julian believed).
Perhaps this was just my growing disenchantment with the town where I had been raisedтАФor a
presentiment that it was about to be stolen away from me.

***

The movie ended with a stirring scene of an American flag, its thirteen stripes and sixty stars rippling in
sunlightтАФbetokening, the narrator insisted, another four years of the prosperity and benevolence
engendered by the rule of Deklan Conqueror, for whom the audience's votes were solicited, not that
there was any competing candidate known or rumored. The film flapped against its reel; the electric bulb
was extinguished. Then the deacons of the Dominion began to reignite the wall lights. Several of the men
in the audience had lit pipes during the cinematic display, and their smoke mingled with the smudge of the
torchieres, a blue-gray thundercloud hovering under the high arches of the ceiling.

Julian seemed distracted, and slumped in his pew with his hat pulled low. "Adam," he whispered, "we
have to find a way out of here."

"I believe I see one," I said; "it's called the doorтАФbut what's the hurry?"

"Look at the door more closely. Two men of the Reserve have been posted there."

I looked, and what he had said was true. "But isn't that just to protect the balloting?" For Ben Kreel
had retaken the stage and was preparing to ask for a formal show of hands.