"Nancy Kress - Fountain of Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.

A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lipsticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put
them in a locket or pocket case or ring, you could carry them around, you could fondle them. None of
this hologram stuff. Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech “re-creations”—even worse.
Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create” the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He
made do with the original, like a sensible person.

So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world.
Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?

And oh, she was so beautiful! Not genemod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so
skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a
goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green.
Not grass, not emerald, not moss. Her own shade. I remember. I—

“Grampops?”

—met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars,
who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will
ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a… People do what
they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—

“Grampops!”

—gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux
bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when
I had money and Miriam had died and—

“Dad!”

And that’s how it started up again. With my son, my grandchildren. Life just never knows when
enough is enough.

“Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice.”

“So this creates an obligation for me to answer?”

My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have
with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go.
We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver
Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria
comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.

Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.

“Reuven, what the shit is that?”

Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don’t curse in front of the children, and—”