"Gene Wolfe - The Arimaspian Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

The years rolled by. With the triumphs and disappointments they brought to me, this
brief tale has nothing to do; as for my boyhood friend, he became an astronomer -- a
discipline admirably suited to his largely nocturnal style of life -- and an acquirer of
old books.

I do not call him a collector, for it seemed to me that he followed no plan. Like many
professional men, he was attracted to accounts of his own profession, and it
sometimes seemed to me that he had a baseless predilection for gold edging.
Scientific conferences of one sort or another took him to distant cities, where he
rarely missed the opportunity of rummaging through such shops as they afforded. I
have heard that he sometimes bought whole stacks of volumes as you or I might a
single book, paying a trifle more to have them mailed home; the boxes in which his
acquisitions arrived might be stacked in his foyer, unopened, for years. In our city,
he haunted garage sales and would buy any number of decayed volumes and toss
them into his rusty van. As far as I am aware, that van was emptied only when it
became too full to hold more. He had inherited his parents' Victorian house, and it
seemed to be his ambition to choke all its many rooms and hallways with old books,
papers of his own, and the dusty instruments of science.

At the time of which I speak, he had nearly succeeded, On my increasingly rare
visits, we had to clear a chair so that I might sit; and on the last, he grudgingly
yielded his own to me and stood. That was three years past, and I never came again.

Thus I was astounded to find him at my apartment door so very early on the
morning he died. His long sallow face seemed unchanged, as did his threadbare
brown suit; but he carried a narrow carton embellished with golden foil -- surely
the kind that distillers of the best class provide at Christmas -- and his eyes held such
a light as I had not seen there since they had first met mine across a shabby
chessboard.

His knock roused me from sleep; but I opened the door, and he handed me the
carton, announcing that we must toast the dawn. "Hah. In glass, too! No plastic. Not
for us -- crystal! May I? Sofa's fine. Need a corkscrew? I could show you how to
manage without one. No ice -- it's melted, and the mammoth lives!"

I filled our glasses and said I was happy to see him, as quite suddenly I was.

"Course you are," he replied. "Hah! Lord! Have I ever lied to you?"

"Frequently," I confessed.

"Good, good! Then you won't flinch when I tell you I've fulfilled my life's ambition --
that I'm -- hah! Potentially the master of the world."
I admitted it could use one.

"Hah. Right." He gulped half his drink and grew serious. "Know what I've been after?
Do you? All my life?"

I did not, yet I could see that he had found it.