"Ian R. MacLeod - Home Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

that stares back at me nowadays from the mirror, even if I do sometimes wish I
could manage her smile. Mum said something to me as she bent down. Always in
these dreams, I can see her lips move, but I can't quite understand. Not
exactly. It was something about making the most of time, love. Time. Love. Home.
Not Long...somethinglike that. And, as always in my dream--in memory, too--I
strain to catch her words. But I can never quite hear them.

MUM DIED WITHIN A YEAR. She fumed gray and her skin faded off her big bones and
the pain that she was reluctant to take medication for often made her irritable.
Little Woolley was eleven by then, with most of her mother's ugly features, most
of her mother's aptitudes. Like Mum, I was already a loner, the giver and taker
of easy playground jokes. And, like Mum, I eventually became a doctor. The only
thing about me, really, that's different--until recently, anyway, when even my
own biological clock has given off the occasional pre-menopausal ping--is that
I've never entertained thoughts of having children. Not that Mum took the usual
step of pairing off with a suitable man. Like me, I suppose, that course was
less than straightforward for her. She went instead to a sperm bank and had the
thing done coldly, methodically, without all the lies and the fumbling, the
pretenses of passion. Thus it was that little Woolley, the product of a nameless
and unknown father, finally entered the world. Thus it was that Woolley began a
life that has ended up here in the Antarctic of a different century as the
product of genes which had, appropriately enough, been frozen.

Two hours out from Epsilon on the trail of the British Antarctic Expedition
under the command of Robert Falcon Scott. Janey pushes the canhopper hard across
the ice plateau. She's in control. Figgis drums his fingers. The tight air
inside the canhopper resonates as the engines drone. Whatever happened between
the two of them last night has left a residue that lies somewhere between love,
lust, anger, despair; the Greeks probably had a word for it. It seems to me that
they've both finally realized that this relationship is heading in the same
direction as every other relationship they've ever been involved in: that the
personality profiles were right. The fact is, Janey and Figgis--despite their
good looks, their relative youth, their admirable if somewhat over-specific
intellects--are both constitutionally incapable of sustaining a long-term
friendship, let alone love. At times like this, I feel truly sorry for them, and
sense more easily the desperation that has driven them here. Both
double-divorcees, Janey and Figgis have been ejected from the present at least
as thoroughly as poor old Woolley has. Perhaps they'd entertained thoughts of
staying together, of using the chat show and media spin-off fees we're hoping to
get when our college goes public to buy a proper house in a Sony enclave and
recover custody of the children they've left in their turbulent wake....

Amazing, when you think about it, that we've lasted out this whole month
together. But we have--just about. The profiles were right about that, too. Me,
I'm simply glad that we're nearly at the end of it, and that the chances seem
reasonably high that we'll return to home time.

"Your turn to drive, Woolley."

I blink my way back to the present.