"Nancy Kress - By Fools Like Me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

BY FOOLS LIKE ME
by Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress will have three new books out next year: an SF novel
from Tor, a collection of short stories from Golden Gryphon Press,
and another short novel from Tachyon. In her latest story for us, she
takes a chilling look at the fires the future could hold.

****

Hope creeps quietly into my bedroom without knocking, peering around the
corner of the rough doorjamb. I’m awake; sleep eludes me so easily now. I
know from the awful smell that she has been to the beach.

“Come in, child, I’m not asleep.”

“Grandma, where’s Mama and Papa?”

“Aren’t they in the field?” The rains are late this year and water for the
crops must be carried in ancient buckets from the spring in the dell.

“Maybe. I didn’t see them. Grandma, I found something.”

“What, child?”

She gazes at me and bites her lip. I see that this mysterious find
bothers her. Such a sensitive child, though sturdy and healthy enough, God
knows how.

“I went to the beach,” she confesses in a rush. “Don’t tell Mama! I
wanted to dig you some trunter roots because you like them so much, but
my shovel went clunk on something hard and I ... I dug it up.”

“Hope,” I reprimand, because the beach is full of dangerous bits of
metal and plastic, washed up through the miles of dead algae on the dead
water. And if a soot cloud blows in from the west, it will hit the beach first.

“I’m sorry,” she says, clearly lying, “but, Grandma, it was a metal box
and the lock was all rusted and there was something inside and I brought it
here.”

“The box?”

“No, that was too heavy. The ... just wait!”
 No one can recognize most of the bits of rusted metal and twisted
plastic from before the Crash. Anything found in a broken metal box should
be decayed beyond recognition. I call “Hope! Don’t touch anything slimy—”
but she is already out of earshot, running from my tiny bedroom with its
narrow cot, which is just blankets and pallet on a rope frame to keep me off
the hard floor. It doesn’t; the old ropes sag too much, just as the thick clay