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

Tip now, farther than I had ever been from Williams Ford; not out here where the flatlands stretched on
each side of the path like the frosty plains of Mars, and the wind, which had been absent all morning,
began to pluck at the fringes of my coat, and my shadow elongated in front of me like a scarecrow gone
riding. It was cold and getting colder, and soon the winter moon would be aloft, and me with only a few
ounces of salt pork in my saddlebag and a few matches to make a fire if I was able to secure any kindling
by nightfall. I began to wonder if I had gone quite insane. At several points I thought: I could go back;
perhaps I hadn't yet been missed; perhaps it wasn't too late to sit down to a Christmas Eve dinner with
my parents, raise a glass of cider to Flaxie and to Christmases past, and wake in time to hear the
ringing-in of the Holiday and smell the goodness of baked bread and Nativity apples drenched in
cinnamon and brown sugar. I mused on it repeatedly, sometimes with tears in my eyes; but I let Rapture
continue carrying me toward the darkest part of the horizon.

Then, after what seemed endless hours of dusk, with only a brief pause when both Rapture and I
drank from a creek which had a skin of ice on it, I began to come among the ruins of the secular ancients.
Not that there was anything spectacular about them. Fanciful drawings often portray the ruins of the
last century as tall buildings, ragged and hollow as broken teeth, forming vine-encrusted canyons and
shadowy cul-de-sacs.[8] No doubt such places existтАФmost of them in the uninhabitable Southwest,
however, where "famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him,"
which would rule out vines and such tropical items[9]тАФbut most ruins were like the ones I now passed,
mere irregularities (or more precisely, regularities) in the landscape, which indicated the former presence
of foundations. These terrains were treacherous, often concealing deep basements that could open like
hungry mouths on an unwary traveler, and only Tipmen loved them. I was careful to keep to the path,
though I began to wonder whether Julian would be as easy to find as I had imaginedтАФ"Lundsford" was a
big locality, and the wind had already begun to scour away the hoofprints I had relied on for navigation.

I was haunted, too, by thoughts of the False Tribulation of the last century. It was not unusual to come
across desiccated human remains in localities like this. Millions had died in the worst dislocations of the
End of Oil: of disease, of internecine strife, but mostly of starvation. The Age of Oil had allowed a fierce
intensity of fertilization and irrigation of the land, which had fed more people than a humbler agriculture
could support. I had seen photographs of Americans from that blighted age, thin as sticks, their children
with distended bellies, crowded into "relief camps" that would soon enough be transformed into
communal graves when the imagined "relief" failed to materialize. No wonder, then, that our ancestors
had mistaken those decades for the Tribulation of prophecy. What was astonishing was how many of our
current institutionsтАФthe Church, the Army, the Federal GovernmentтАФhad survived more or less intact.
There was a passage in the Dominion Bible that Ben Kreel had read whenever the subject of the False
Tribulation arose in school, and which I had committed to memory: The field is wasted, the land
mourns; for the corn is shriveled, the wine has dried, the oil languishes. Be ashamed, farmers;
howl, vinekeepers; howl for the wheat and the barley, for the harvest of the field has perished. . .

It had made me shiver then, and it made me shiver now, in these barrens which had been stripped of
all their utility by a century of scavenging. Where in this rubble was Julian, and where was his pursuer?

It was by his fire I found him. But I was not the first to arrive.

***

The sun was altogether down, and a hint of the aurora borealis played about the northern sky,
dimmed by moonlight, when I came to the most recently excavated section of Lundsford. The temporary
dwellings of the TipmenтАФrude huts of scavenged timberтАФhad been abandoned here for the season, and
corduroy ramps led down into the empty digs.