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

moving rapidly in the realm of the aristos, events I could barely comprehend.

"We can wait them out," I said, a little desperately. "The Reserves can't stay in Williams Ford
forever."

"No. Unfortunately neither can I, for Deklan Conqueror knows where to find me, and has made up
his mind to remove me from the game of politics like a captured chesspiece."

"But where will you go? And whatтАФ"

He put a finger to his mouth. There was a noise from the front of the Dominion Church Hall, as of the
doors being thrown open, and voices of congregants arguing or wailing over the news of the conscription
drive. "Ride with me," Julian said. "Quick, now!"

We did not follow the main street, but caught a path that turned behind the blacksmith's barn and
through the wooded border of the River Pine, north in the general direction of the Estate. The night was
dark, and the horses stepped slowly, but they knew the path almost by instinct, and some light from the
town still filtered through the thinly falling snow, which touched my face like a hundred small cold fingers.

***

"It was never possible that I could stay at Williams Ford forever," Julian said. "You ought to have
known that, Adam."

Truly, I should have. It was Julian's constant theme, after all: the impermanence of things. I had always
put this down to the circumstances of his childhood, the death of his father, the separation from his
mother, the kind but aloof tutelage of Sam Godwin.

But I could not help thinking once more of THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE and the
photographs in itтАФnot of the First Men on the Moon, who were Americans, but of the Last Visitors to
that celestial sphere, who had been Chinamen, and whose "space suits" had been firecracker-red. Like
the Americans, they had planted their flag in expectation of more visitations to come; but the End of Oil
and the False Tribulation had put paid to those plans.

And I thought of the even lonelier Plains of Mars, photographed by machines (or so the book alleged)
but never touched by human feet. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.
Somehow I had stumbled into one. The snow squall ended; the uninhabited moon came through the
clouds; and the winter fields of Williams Ford glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

"If you must leave," I said, "let me come with you."
"No," Julian said promptly. He had pulled his hat down around his ears, to protect himself from the
cold, and I couldn't see much of his face, but his eyes shone when he glanced in my direction. "Thank
you, Adam. I wish it were possible. But it isn't. You must stay here, and dodge the draft, if possible, and
polish your literary skills, and one day write books, like Mr. Charles Curtis Easton."

That was my ambition, which had grown over the last year, nourished by our mutual love of books
and by Sam Godwin's exercises in English Composition, for which I had discovered an unexpected
talent.[6] At the moment it seemed a petty dream. Evanescent. Like all dreams. Like life itself. "None of
that matters," I said.