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

"Now you're thinking like a philosopher," he said, grinning.

"No wonder they're such a miserable brigade, then."

"Unfair, Adam—you've never seen a philosopher in your life." Julian believed in Philosophers and
claimed to have met one or two.

"Well, I imagine they're miserable, if they go around thinking of themselves as ghosts and such."
 "It's the condition of all things," Julian said. "This blackberry, for example." He plucked one and held it
in the pale palm of his hand. "Has it always looked like this?"

"Obviously not," I said, impatiently.

"Once it was a tiny green bud of a thing, and before that it was part of the substance of the bramble,
which before that was a seed inside a blackberry—"

"And round and round for all eternity."

"But no, Adam, that's the point. The bramble, and that tree over there, and the gourds in the field, and
the crow circling over them—they're all descended from ancestors that didn't quite resemble them. A
blackberry or a crow is a form, and forms change over time, the way clouds change shape as they travel
across the sky."

"Forms of what?"

"Of DNA," Julian said earnestly. (The BIOLOGY he had picked out of the Tip was not the first
BIOLOGY he had read.)

"Julian," Sam warned, "I once promised this boy's parents you wouldn't corrupt him."

I said, "I've heard of DNA. It's the life force of the secular ancients. And it's a myth."

"Like men walking on the moon?"

"Exactly."

"And who's your authority on this? Ben Kreel? The Dominion History of the Union?"

"Nothing is changeless except DNA? That's a peculiar argument even from you, Julian."

"It would be, if I were making it. But DNA isn't changeless. It struggles to remember itself, but it
never remembers itself perfectly. Remembering a fish, it imagines a lizard. Remembering a horse, it
imagines a hippopotamus. Remembering an ape, it imagines a man."

"Julian!" Sam was insistent now. "That's quite enough."

"You sound like a Darwinist," I said.

"Yes," Julian admitted, smiling in spite of his unorthodoxy, the autumn sun turning his face the color of