"Joe Haldeman - For White Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

still learn from you."
I didn't much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: "I'm more likely to learn from you."

"Oh, I don't think so." She smiled in a measured way. "You don't have much to learn."

Or much I could, or would, learn. "Have you been down to the water?"

"Once." She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. "It's interesting. Doesn't look real." I picked
up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my
water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

"first body?" I asked.

"I'm not tired of it yet." She gave me a sideways look, amused. "You must be on your fourth or fifth."

"I go through a dozen a year." She laughed. "Actually, it's still my second. I hung on to the first too long."

"I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible."

"Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute." I had been making a "controlled" fracture in a large
boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over
onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had
been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. "It affected all of my work, of course.
I can't even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body."

"They are hard to look at," she said. "Not to say they aren't well done, and beautiful, in their way."

"As what is not? In its way." We came to the first building ruins and stopped. "Not all of this is
weathering. Even in four hundred years." If you studied the rubble you could reconstruct part of the
design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. "Somebody came in here with
heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought."

"They say not." She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. "Rage, I suppose. Once people
knew that no one was going to live."

"It's hard to imagine." The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the
nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. "Not hard to understand,
though. The need to break something." I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there
helpless, dying fromsculpture , of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at my own inattention and
clumsiness.

"They had a poem about that," she said. " 'Rage, rage against the dying of the light.' "

"Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?"

"Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred." She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment
that had two letters on it. "I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church." She
pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. "That looks like it was some
kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance." She tiptoes through the rubble toward the far end of the
arc, studying what was written on the face-up pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made