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

my mother make of it? (Of course I would not tell them.)

At this point I backed off, and found a grassy patch a little away from the rubble, where I could sit
and eat some of the lunch I had packed, and watch Julian, who continued to sort through the detritus with
a kind of scholarly intensity. Sam Godwin came and joined me, brushing a spot on an old timber so he
could recline without soiling his uniform, such as it was.
 "He sure loves those old books," I said, making conversation.

Sam was often taciturn—the very picture of an old veteran—but he nodded and spoke familiarly:
"He's learned to love them. I helped teach him. I wonder if that was wise. Maybe he loves them too
much. It might be they'll kill him, one of these days."

"How, Sam? By the apostasy of them?"

"Julian's too smart for his own good. He debates with the Dominion clergy. Just last week I found him
arguing with Ben Kreel[2] about God, history, and such abstractions. Which is precisely what he must not
do, if he wants to survive the next few years."

"Why, what threatens him?"

"The jealousy of the powerful," Sam said, but he would say no more on the subject, only sat and
stroked his graying beard, and glanced occasionally, and uneasily, to the east.

***

The day went on, and eventually Julian had to drag himself from his nest of books with only a pair of
prizes: the INTRODUCTION TO BIOLOGY and another volume called GEOGRAPHY OF NORTH
AMERICA. Time to go, Sam insisted; better to be back at the Estate by supper; in any case, riders had
been sent ahead, and the official pickers and Dominion curators would soon be here to cull what we had
left.

But I have said that Julian tutored me in one of his apostasies. Here is how it happened. We stopped,
at the drowsy end of the afternoon, at the height of a ridge overlooking the town of Williams Ford, the
grand Estate upstream of it, and the River Pine as it cut through the valley on its way from the mountains
of the West. From this vantage we could see the steeple of the Dominion Hall, and the revolving wheels
of the grist mill and the lumber mill, and so on, blue in the long light and hazy with woodsmoke, colored
here and there with what remained of the autumn foliage. Far to the south a railway bridge crossed the
gorge of the Pine like a suspended thread. Go inside, the weather seemed to proclaim; it's fair but it
won't be fair for long; bolt the window, stoke the fire, boil the apples; winter's due. We rested our
horses on the windy hilltop, and Julian found a blackberry bramble where the berries were still plump and
dark, and we plucked some of these and ate them.

This was the world I had been born into. It was an autumn like every autumn I could remember. But I
could not help thinking of the Tip and its ghosts. Maybe those people, the people who had lived through
the Efflorescence of Oil and the False Tribulation, had felt about their homes and neighborhoods as I felt
about Williams Ford. They were ghosts to me, but they must have seemed real enough to
themselves—must have been real; had not realized they were ghosts; and did that I mean I was also a
ghost, a revenant to haunt some future generation?

Julian saw my expression and asked me what was the matter. I told him my thoughts.