"Kim Stanley Robinson - Vinland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

it is a true story or not!"
She paced before him. "A friend of mine once told
me something he had read in a book," she said. "It was
by a man who sailed the Red Sea, long ago. He told of a
servant boy on one of the dhows, who could not
remember ever having been cared for. The boy had
become a sailor at age three--before that, he had been a
beach-comber." She stopped pacing and looked at the
beach below them. "Often I imagined that little boy's life.
Surviving alone on a beach, at that age--it astonished me.
It made me. . . happy."
She turned to look at him. "But later I told this story
to an expert in child development, and he just shook his
head. 'It probably wasn't true,' he said. Not a lie,
exactly, but a. . . ."
"A stretcher," the professor suggested.
"A stretcher, exactly. He supposed that the boy had
been somewhat older, or had had some help. You
know."
The professor nodded.
"But in the end," the minister said, "I found this
judgement did not matter to me. In my mind I still saw
that toddler, searching the tidepools for his daily food.
And so for me the story lives. And that is all that
matters. We judge all the stories from history like
that--we value them according to how much they spur
our imaginations."
 The professor stared at her. He rubbed his jaw,
looked around. Things had the sharp-edged clarity they
sometimes get after a sleepness night, as if glowing with
internal light. He said, "Someone with opinions like
yours probably shouldn't have the job that you do."
"I didn't know I had them," the minister said. "I only
just came upon them in the last couple of hours, thinking
about it."
The professor was surprised. "You didn't sleep?"
She shook her head. "Who could sleep on a night
like this?"
"My feeling exactly!" He almost smiled. "So. A
nuit blanche, you call it?"
"Yes," she said. "A nuit blanche for two." And she
looked down at him with that amused glance of hers, as
if. . . as if she understood him.
She extended her arms toward him, grasped his
hands, helped pull him to his feet. They began to walk
back toward the tents, across the site of L'Anse aux
Meadows. The grass was wet with dew, and very green.

"I still think," he said as they walked together, "that
we want more than stories from the past. We want