"Joe Haldeman - Old Twentieth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Look, Jacob," her face says to me. "You have to get hold of yourself. Just look at the goddamned
pictures."
My tongue explores the ridge of shattered bone where my teeth used to be. I wish I could tell her to
go away.
"You can't die here," Bruce repeats. He holds the pictures out, fanned like a poker hand. "Where
would you most like to go?"
Big Ben. It must be cool in London, this time of year.




file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruisw...enten/spaar/Joe%20Haldeman%20-%20Old%20Twentieth.htm (6 of 184)20-2-2006 21:45:02
Old Twentieth




ONE

WINE AND TIME
My family has a tradition, going back to the nineteenth century, that whenever a child was born
(only a male child, originally), the father would buy a case of promising wine of that year's vintage.
The first bottle would be opened on the child's birthday, eighteen years later. The other eleven
bottles he or she would open to commemorate important occasions, and if any remained when he or
she died, it would be passed on to the next generation.
Father's grandfather was the luckiest of our line, born in 1945. His father presciently bought a case of
Château Mouton-Rothschild, the "Victory Vintage" celebrating the end of World War II. It was two
dollars a bottle, and became the wine of the century.
His luck wouldn't last, though. He went off to war himself, a professional soldier in an
unprofessional conflict, and didn't live to see his only son, my grandfather.
Of the ten precious bottles Grandfather inherited, along with a case of some forgotten 1973 vintage,
four were passed on to my father. He left me one of them.
I would carry it to the stars.
My father died in what they now call the Immortality War, or just the War—a worldwide class
struggle precipitated by the Becker-Cendrek Process, which at the time seemed to have made
obsolete the idea of death by natural causes. A few months after you take the BCP pill, your body
becomes a self-repairing machine.
There's a limit to its repairing ability, of course. After my father was captured by the enemy fundies,
he was tied to a pole, drenched in gasoline, and set afire, and stopped being immortal a few years
after he began. Most of us suffered similar fates if we were caught, and the War became increasingly
vicious on both sides.
It ended quietly with Lot 92, a biological agent that was never given, nor ever needed, a dramatic
name. It killed 7 billion people in a month, leaving the world safe for 200 million immortals.
Most of the enemy died in their sleep. At the time, I felt that that was too good for them. I resented
the backbreaking and disgusting labor of finding their bodies and hauling them out for disposal, at
first burying them, then consigning them to huge pyres.
The people who killed my father had sent my mother and me a cube of his death. So it didn't greatly
bother me, at sixteen, to warm my hands in the heat of their flames.
That was more than two hundred years ago, and now I feel sadness rather than anger. The first BCP
pills were incredibly expensive; my father had sold two of the 1945 Mouton-Rothschild bottles, each