"George Zebrowski - Wound the Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

my team recruit, “we're sure to see the main group.”

“Why ‘sure'?” he asked, peering through the shimmering heat, face shadowed by the wide brim of his
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hat.

“Because they've been in their plot of forest a long time now, living off the wildlife. They have to move.”

“Quite right,” he said, then was quiet for a while, reluctant to say whatever he wanted to say to me, as if
the heat were trying to squeeze an unwelcome thought out of him. I felt his rivalry with me, but he seemed
only distantly aware of his feelings.

“Why bother,” he said finally. “They don't want our help. Never did.”

There were such pockets left all over the world, of people who still didn't want to live on beyond the old
human lifespans, as we did, making up our lives as we went along as we tried to mold the indefinite
futures. It was hard for the majority to which I now belonged to see why these backwards hid from us,
why they didn't greet us with open arms.

“They don't want us,” O'Connor said again, this time with a hint of reproach in his voice.

“Then why are you here?” I asked, thinking of the strange missionary I had become, bringing the gospel
of longlife back to the nature dwellers.

“No ... why areyou here?” he mumbled, hiding under his hat. “You've been at this longer than I have.”

I knew why. I had always known why. “It may trouble you to understand,” I said, “but their existence
still tells us who we are. It makes us think about who they are, and why they are here, and why we have
left them behind.”

He squinted at me from under his brim. “And that's your reason?”

“One of them. There is strength in these people that we should not lose.”

“Pretty abstract. I thought that somehow ... you cared, emotionally, I mean.”

“I do.”

“I don't see the care in your face,” he said.

“They're like us, as most of us were not so long ago. Still more like us than not.”

I looked out across the veldt to the forest that sat halfway to the horizon as if it had been driven to clump
there by the arid emptiness of the plain. Behind his show of detachment, O'Connor probably cared too
much, or too little. I couldn't tell which. Like most of us, he had too much life ahead of him to be
disturbed by anything near-term.