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

Acknowledgements. Later he walked her back to the
fire, now reduced to banked red coals. She put her hand
to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and
he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn't
understand it. He had drunk so much! Why be so
upset about it, why? It was his job to find the truth;
having found it, he should be happy! Why had no one
told him what he would feel?
The minister said good-night. She was off to bed;
she suggested he do likewise. Her look was
compassionate, her voice firm.
When she was gone he hunted down the bottle of
cognac, and drank the rest of it. The fire was dying, the
students and workers scattered--in the tents, or out in the
night, in couples.
He walked by himself back down to the site.
Low mounds, of walls that had never been. Beyond
the actual site were rounded buildings, models built by
the park service, to show tourists what the "real"
buildings had looked like. When Vikings had camped on
the edge of the new world. Repairing their boats.
Finding food. Fighting among themselves, mad with epic
jealousies. Fighting the dangerous Indians. Getting
killed, and then driven away from this land, so much
lusher than Greenland.
A creak in the brush and he jumped, startled. It
would have been like that: death in the night, creeping up
on you--he turned with a jerk, and every starlit shadow
bounced with hidden skraelings, their bows drawn taut,
their arrows aimed at his heart. He quivered, hunched
over.
But no. It hadn't been like that. Not at all. Instead, a
man with spectacles and a bag full of old junk, directing
some unemployed sailors as they dug. Nondescript,
taciturn, nameless; one night he would have wandered
back there into the forest, perhaps fallen or had a heart
attack--become a skeleton wearing leathers and
swordbelt, with spectacles over the skull's eyesockets,
the anachronism that gave him away at last. . . . The
professor staggered over the low mounds toward the
trees, intent on finding that inadvertent grave. . . .
But no. It wouldn't be there. The taciturn figure
hadn't been like that. He would have been far away when
he died, nothing to show what he had spent years of his
life doing. A man in a hospital for the poor, the bronze
pin in his pocket overlooked by the doctor, stolen by an
undertaker's assistant. An anonymous figure, to the