"Gene Wolfe - Counting Cats in Zanzibar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

COUNTING CATS IN ZANZIBAR
by Gene Wolfe
_______________________________________
Taken from: Year's Best SF 2
Edited by David G. Hartwell
Copyright © 1997 by David G. Hartwell
ISBN 0-06-105746-0

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-01-2002 [v1.0]




The first thing she did upon arising was count her money. The sun itself was barely up, the morning cool
with the threatening freshness peculiar to the tropics, the freshness, she thought, that says, "Breathe deep
of me while you can."
Three thousand and eighty-seven U.N. dollars left. It was all there. She pulled on the hot-pink
underpants that had been the only ones she could find to fit her in Kota Kinabalu and hid the money as
she had the day before. The same skirt and blouse as yesterday; there would be no chance to do more
than rinse, wring out, and hang dry before they made land.
And precious little then, she thought; but that was wrong. With this much money she would have
been able to board with an upper-class family and have her laundry micropored, rest, and enjoy a dozen
good meals before she booked passage to Zamboanga.
Or Darwin. Clipping her shoes, she went out on deck.
He joined her so promptly that she wondered whether he had been listening, his ears attuned to the
rattle and squeak of her cabin door. She said, "Good morning." And he, "The dawn comes up like
thunder out of China across the bay. That's the only quote I've been able to think of. Now you're safe for
the rest of the trip."
"But you're not," she told him, and nearly added
Doctor Johnson's observation that to be on a ship is to be in prison, with the added danger of
drowning.
He came to stand beside her, leaning as she did against the rickety railing. "Things talk to you, you
said that last night. What kind of things?"
She smiled. "Machines. Animals, too. The wind and the rain."
"Do they ever give you quotations?" He was big and looked thirty-five or a little past it, with a wide
Irish mouth that smiled easily and eyes that never smiled at all.
"I'd have to think. Not often, but perhaps one has."
He was silent for a time, a time during which she watched the dim shadow that was a shark glide
under the hull and back out again. No shark's ever talked to me, she thought, except him. In another
minute or two he'll want to know the time for breakfast.
"I looked at a map once." He squinted at the sun, now half over the horizon. "It doesn't come up out
of China when you're in Mandelay."
"Kipling never said it did. He said that happened on the road there. The soldier in his poem might
have gone there from India. Or anywhere. Mapmakers colored the British Empire pink two hundred
years ago, and two hundred years ago half Earth was pink."
He glanced at her. "You're not British, are you?"
"No, Dutch."
"You talk like an American."
"I've lived in the United States, and in England, too; and I can be more English than the British when
I want to. I have heerd how many ord'nary veman one vidder's equal to, in pint 'o comin' over you. I