"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

Julian: A Christmas Story
by Robert Charles Wilson



1
This is a story about Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his uncle) Julian
Conqueror. But it is not about his conquests, such as they were, or his betrayals, or about the War in
Labrador, or Julian's quarrels with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed many of those events—and
will no doubt write about them, ultimately—but this narrative concerns Julian when he was young, and I
was young, and neither of us was famous.


2
In late October of 2172—an election year—Julian and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to
the Tip east of the town of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one
of his heresies.

It was a brisk, sunny day. There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in that part of
Athabaska, in those days. Our summers were long, languid, and hot. Spring and fall were brief, mere
custodial functions between the extremes of weather. Winters were short but biting. Snow set in around
the end of December, and the River Pine generally thawed by late March.

Today might be the best we would get of autumn. It was a day we should have spent under Sam
Godwin's tutelage, perhaps sparring, or target-shooting, or reading chapters from the Dominion History
of the Union. But Sam was not a heartless overseer, and the kindness of the weather had suggested the
possibility of an Outing, and so we had gone to the stables, where my father worked, and drawn horses,
and ridden out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and salt ham in our back-satchels.

We rode east, away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead; Sam rode behind, a
watchful presence, his Pittsburgh rifle ready in the saddle holster at his side. There was no immediate
threat of trouble, but Sam Godwin believed in perpetual preparedness; if he had a gospel, it was BE
PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was
old (nearly fifty), wore a dense brown beard stippled with wiry white hairs, and was dressed in what
remained presentable of his tan-and-green Army of the Californias uniform, and a cloak to keep the wind
off. He was like a father to Julian, Julian's own true father having performed a gallows dance some years
before. Lately he had been more vigilant than ever, for reasons he had not discussed, at least with me.

Julian was my age (seventeen), and we were approximately the same height, but there the
resemblance ended. Julian had been born an aristo; my family was of the leasing class. His skin was clear
and pale where mine was dark and lunar. (I was marked by the same Pox that took my sister Flaxie to
her grave in '63.) His hair was long and almost femininely clean; mine was black and wiry, cut to stubble
by my mother with her sewing scissors, and I washed it once a week or so—more often in summer,
when the brook behind the cottage ran clean and cool. His clothes were linen and, in places, silk,
brass-buttoned, cut to fit; my shirt and pants were course hempen cloth, sewn to a good approximation
but obviously not the work of a New York tailor.
 And yet we were friends, and had been friends for three years, since we met by chance in the
forested hills west of the Duncan and Crowley Estate, where we had gone to hunt, Julian with his fine
Porter & Earle cassette rifle and me with a simple muzzle-loader. We both loved books, especially the
boys' books written in those days by an author named Charles Curtis Easton.[1] I had been carrying a