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

bundled piles into a stack beside a tent.

These twine-wrapped bales were books . . . old, tattered, and wholly free of the Dominion Stamp of
Approval. They must have been more than a century old; for although they were faded they had
obviously once been colorful and expensively printed, not made of stiff brown paper like the Charles
Curtis Easton books of modern times. They had not even rotted much. Their smell, under the cleansing
Athabaska sunlight, was inoffensive.

"Sam!" Julian whispered. He had already drawn his knife and was slicing through the twine.

"Calm down," suggested Sam, who was not an enthusiast like Julian.

"Oh, but—Sam! We should have brought a cart!"

"We can't carry away armloads, Julian, nor would we ever have been allowed to. The Dominion
scholars will have all this. Though perhaps you can get away with a volume or two."

The Tipman said, "These are from Lundsford." Lundsford was the name of a ruined town thirty or so
miles to the southeast. The Tipman leaned toward Sam Godwin, who was his own age, and said: "We
thought Lundsford had been mined out a decade ago. But even a dry well may freshen. One of my
workers spotted a low place off the main excavations—a sort of sink-hole: the recent rain had cut it
through. Once a basement or warehouse of some kind. Oh, sir, we found good china there, and
glasswork, and many more books than this . . . most were mildewed, but some had been protected
under a kind of stiff oilcoth, and were lodged beneath a partially-collapsed ceiling . . . there had been a
fire, but they survived it . . ."

"Good work, Tipman," Sam Godwin said.

"Thank you, sir! Perhaps you could remember me to the great men of the Estate?" And he gave his
name (which I have forgotten).

Julian had fallen to his knees amidst the compacted clay and rubble of the Tip, lifting up each book in
turn and examining it with wide eyes. I joined him in his exploration.

I had never much liked the Tip. It had always seemed to me a haunted place. And of course it was
haunted: that was its purpose, to house the revenants of the past, ghosts of the False Tribulation startled
out of their century-long slumber. Here was evidence of the best and worst of the people who had
inhabited the Years of Vice and Profligacy. Their fine things were very fine, their glassware especially,
and it was a straitened aristo indeed who did not possess antique table-settings rescued from some ruin
or other. Sometimes one might find silver utensils in boxes, or useful tools, or coins. The coins were too
plentiful to be worth much, individually, but they could be worked into buttons or other adornments. One
of the high-born back at the Estate owned a saddle studded with copper pennies all from the year 2032.
(I had occasionally been enlisted to polish it.)

But here also was the trash and inexplicable detritus: "plastic," gone brittle with sunlight or soft with the
juices of the earth; bits of metal blooming with rust; electronic devices blackened by time and imbued
with the sad inutility of a tensionless spring; engine parts, corroded; copper wire rotten with verdigris;
aluminum cans and steel barrels eaten through by the poisonous fluids they had once contained—and so
on, almost ad infinitum.