"Joe Haldeman - Four Short Novels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

accepted it as a pet, sharing his rehydrated Kentucky Fried Chicken and fish and chips with it.
Life was a pleasantly sterile and objectless quest. Custer and his kangaroo quartered the
outback, turning over rocks just to bother the things underneath. The kangaroo was loyal, which
was a liability, but at least it couldn’t talk, and its attachment to Custer was transparently
selfish, so they got along. He taught it how to beg, and, by not rewarding it, taught it how to
whimper.
One day, like Robinson Crusoe, he found footprints. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he hastened in the
opposite direction.
But the footprinter had been watching him for some time, and outsmarted him. Knowing he would
be gone all day, she had started miles away, walking backward by his camp, and knew that his
instinct for hermitage would lead him directly, perversely, back into her cave.
Parky Gumma had decided to become a hermit, too, after she read about Custer’s audacious
gesture. But after about a year she wanted a bath, and someone to love her so she wouldn’t die, in
that order. So under the wheeling Milky Way, on the eve of the thirty-first century, she stalked
backward to her cave, and squandered a month’s worth of water sluicing her body, which was
unremarkable except for the fact that it was clean and the only female one in two hundred thousand
square miles.
Parky left herself unclothed and squeaky clean, carefully perched on a camp stool, waiting for
Custer’s curiosity and misanthropy to lead him back to her keep. He crept in a couple of hours
after sunrise.
She stood up and spread her arms, and his pet kangaroo boinged away in terror.
Custer himself was paralyzed by a mixture of conflicting impulses. He had seen pictures of
naked women, but never one actually in the flesh, and honestly didn’t know what to do.
Parky showed him.
The rest is the unmaking of history. That Parky had admired him and followed him into the
desert was even more endearing than the slip and slide that she demonstrated for him after she
washed him up. But that was revolutionary, too. Custer had to admit that a year or a century or a
millennium of that would be better than keeling over and having dingos tear up your corpse and
spread your bones over the uncaring sands.
So this is Custer’s story, and ours. He never did get around to liking baths, so you couldn’t
say that love conquers all. But it could still conquer death.




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