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

Discussion. The burnt garbage smell of peat wafted
downwind, and offshore the calm water of the bay was
riffled by the same gentle breeze. The minister warmed
her hands at the blaze for a moment, then gestured at the
bay. "It's hard to believe they were never here at all."
"I know," the professor said. "It looks like a Viking
site, I'll give him that."
 "Him," the minister repeated.
"I know, I know. This whole thing forces you to
imagine a man in the eighteen twenties and thirties,
traveling all over--Norway, Iceland, Canada, New
England, Rome, Stockholm, Denmark, Greenland. . . .
Crisscrossing the North Atlantic, to bury all these signs."
He shook his head. "It's incredible."
He retrieved the cognac bottle and refilled. He was,
he had to admit, beginning to feel drunk. "And so many
parts of the hoax were well hidden! You can't assume
we've found them all. This place had two butternuts
buried in the midden, and butternuts only grow down
below the St. Lawrence, so who's to say they aren't
clues, indicating another site down there? That's where
grapevines actually grow, which would justify the name
Vinland. I tell you, the more I know about this hoaxer,
the more certain I am that other sites exist. The tower in
Newport, Rhode Island, for instance--the hoaxer didn't
build that, because it's been around since the seventeenth
century--but a little work out there at night, in the early
nineteenth century. . . I bet if it were excavated
completely, you'd find a few Norse artifacts."
"Buried in all the right places," the minister said.
"Exactly." The professor nodded. "And up the
coast of Labrador, at Cape Porcupine where the sagas
say they repaired a ship. There too. Stuff scattered
everywhere, left to be discovered or not."
The minister waved her plastic cup. "But surely this
site must have been his masterpiece. He couldn't have
done too many as extensive as this."
 "I shouldn't think so." The professor drank deeply,
smacked his numbed lips. "Maybe one more like this,
down in New Brunswick. That's my guess. But this was
surely one of his biggest projects."
"It was a time for that kind of thing," the volunteer
laborer offered. "Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria. . . ."
The minister nodded. "It fulfills a certain desire."
"Theosophy, most of that," the professor muttered.
"This was different."
The volunteer wandered off. The professor and the
minister looked into the fire for a while.