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

reflected on this. He polished off another cup of cognac.
The minister watched him drink, then said kindly, "There
is nothing to be done about it, really. That is the nature
of the past."
"I know."


Conclusions. They threw the last big logs on the
fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free
among the stars. The professor felt numb all over, his
heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive
masks, dancing in the light. The songs were harsh and
raucous, he couldn't understand the words. The wind
was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck
goosepimpled uncomfortably. He felt sick with alcohol,
and knew it would be a while before his body could
overmaster it.
The minister led him away from the fire, then up the
rocky ridge. Getting him away from the students and
laborers, no doubt, so he wouldn't embarrass himself.
Starlight illuminated the heather and broken granite under
their feet. He stumbled. He tried to explain to her what it
meant, to be an archaelogist whose most important work
was the discovery that a bit of their past was a falsehood.

"It's like a mosaic," he said, drunkenly trying to
follow the fugitive thought. "A puzzle with most of the
pieces gone. A tapestry. And if you pull a thread out. . .
it's ruined. So little lasts! We need every bit we can
find!"
She seemed to understand. In her student days, she
told him, she had waitressed at a café in Montreal. Years
later she had gone down the street to have a look, just for
nostalgia's sake. The café was gone. The street was
completely different. And she couldn't remember the
names of any of the people she had worked with. "This
was my own past, not all that many years ago!"
The professor nodded. Cognac was rushing through
his veins, and as he looked at the minister, so beautiful in
the starlight, she seemed to him a kind of muse, a spirit
sent to comfort him, or frighten him, he couldn't tell
which. Cleo, he thought. The muse of history.
Someone he could talk to.
She laughed softly. "Sometimes it seems our lives
are much longer than we usually think. So that we live
through incarnations, and looking back later we have
nothing but. . . ." She waved a hand.
"Bronze pins," the professor said. "Iron rivets."
"Yes." She looked at him. Her eyes were bright in
the starlight. "We need an archaelogy for our own lives."