"Ballard, J G - The Drowned World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)

Gradually, as the minutes passed, the preservation of this distant zodiac, perhaps the very configuration of constellations that had encompassed the Earth during the Triassic Period, seemed to Kerans a task more important than any other facing him. He stepped down from the dais and began to return to the control room, dragging the air-line after him. As he reached the panel door he felt the line snake Out through his hands, and with an impulse of anger seized a loop and anchored it around the handle of the door. He waited until the line tautened, then wound a second loop around the handle, providing himself with a radius of a dozen feet. He walked back down the steps and stopped half-way down the aisle, head held back, determined to engrave the image of the constellations on his retina. Already their patterns seemed more familiar than those of the classical constellations. In a vast, convulsive recession of the equinoxes, a billion sidereal days had reborn themselves, re-aligned the nebulae and island universes in their original perspectives.
A sharp spur of pain drove itself into his eustachian tube, forcing him to swallow. Abruptly he realised that the intake valve of the helmet supply was no longer working. A faint hiss seeped through every ten seconds, but the pressure had fallen steeply. Dizzying, he stmnbled up the aisle and tried to free the air-line from the handle, certain now that Strangman had seized the opportunity to fabricate an accident. Breath exploding, he tripped over one of the steps, fell awkwardly across the seats with a gentle ballooning motion.
As the spotlight flared across the domed ceiling, illuminating the huge vacant womb for the last time, Kerans felt the warm bloodfilled nausea of the chamber flood in upon him. He lay back, spreadeagled across the steps, his hand pressed numbly against the loop of line around the door handle, the soothing pressure of the water penetrating his suit so that the barriers between his own private blood-stream and that of the giant amnion seemed no longer to exist. The deep cradle of silt carried him gently like an immense placenta, infinitely softer than any bed he had ever known. Far above him, as his consciousness faded, he could see the ancient nebulae and galaxies shining through the uterine night, but eventually even their light was dimmed and he was only aware of the faint glimmer of identity within the deepest recesses of his mind. Quietly he began to move towards it, floating slowly towards the centre of the dome, knowing that this faint beacon was receding more rapidly then he could approach it. When it was no longer visible he pressed on through the darkness alone, like a blind fish in an endless forgotten sea, driven by an impulse whose identity be would never comprehend. . . .

Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface. Within his lungs an immense inland lake seemed to be bursting outwards, his rib-cage distended like a whale's to contain the oceanic volumes of water.

"Kerans. . . ."
He looked up at the bright deck, at the brilliant panoply of light on the canvas shade above him, at the watchful ebony face of the Admiral sitting across his legs and pumping his chest in his huge hands.
"Strangman, he. . . ." Choking on the expressed fluid in his throat, Kerans let his head loll back onto the hot deck, the sunlight stinging his eyes. A circle of faces looked down at him intently-- Beatrice, her eyes wide with alarm, Bodkin frowning seriously, a motley of brown faces under khaki kepis. Abruptly a single white grinning face interposed itself. Only a few feet from him, it leered like an obscene statue.
"Strangman, you--"
The grin broke into a winning smile. "No, I didn't, Kerans. Don't try to pin the blame on me. Dr. Bodkin will vouch for that." He waggled a finger at Kerans. "I warned you not to go down too far."
The Admiral stood up, evidently satisfied that Kerans had recovered. The deck seemed to be made of burning iron, and Kerans pulled himself up on one elbow, sat weakly in the pool of water. A few feet away, creased in the scuppers, the suit lay like a deflated corpse.
Beatrice pushed through the circle of onlookers, and crouched down beside him. "Robert, relax, don't think about it now." She put her arm around his shoulders, glancing up watchfully at Strangman. He stood behind Kerans, grinning with pleasure, hands on hips,
"The cable seized . . ." Kerans cleared his head, his lungs like two bruised, tender flowers. He breathed slowly, soothing them with the cool air. "They were pulling it from above. Didn't you stop. . . ."
Bodkin stepped forward with Kerans' jacket and draped it across his shoulders. "Easy, Robert, it doesn't matter now. Actually, I'm sure it wasn't Strangman's fault, he was talking to Beatrice and me when it happened. The cable was hooked round some obstruction, it looks as if it was a complete accident."
"No, it wasn't, Doctor," Strangman cut in. "Don't perpetuate a myth, Kerans will be much more grateful for the truth. He anchored that cable himself, quite deliberately. Why?" Here Strangman tapped the air magisterially. "Because he wanted to become part of the drowned world." He began to laugh to himself, slapping his thighs with amusement as Kerans hobbled weakly to his chair. "And the joke is that he doesn't know whether I'm telling the truth or not. Do you realise that, Bodkin? Look at him, he genuinely isn't sure! God, what irony!"
"Strangman!" Beatrice snapped at him angrily, overcoming her fears. "Stop saying that! It might have been an accident."
Strangman shrugged theatrically. "It _might_," he repeated with great emphasis. "Let's admit that. It makes it more interesting-- particularly for Kerans. '_Did I or did I not try to kill myself?_' One of the few existential absolutes, far more significant than 'To be or not to be?', which merely underlines the uncertainty of the suicide, rather than the eternal ambivalence of his victim." He smiled down patronisingly at Kerans as the latter sat quietly in his chair, sipping at the drink Beatrice had brought him. "Kerans, I envy you the task of finding out--if you can."
Kerans managed a weak smile. From the speed of his recovery he realised that he had suffered only mildly from the drowning. The remainder of the crew had moved away to their duties, no longer interested.
"Thank you, Strangman. I'll let you know when I have the answer."
On the way back to the Ritz he sat silently in the stern of the scow, thinking to himself of the great womb-chamber of the planetarium and the multilayered overlay of its associations, trying to erase from his mind the terrible 'either/or' which Strangman had correctly posed. Had he unconsciously locked the air-pipe, knowing that the tension in the cable would suffocate him, or had it been a complete accident, even, possibly, an attempt by Strangman to injure him? But for the rescue by the two skin divers (perhaps he bad counted on them setting out after him when the telephone cable was disconnected) he would certainly have found the answer. His reasons for making the dive at all remained obscure. There was no doubt that he had been impelled by a curious urge to place himself at Strangman's mercy, almost as if he were staging his own murder.
During the next few days the conundrum remained unsolved. Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which had possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero? Rather than try to live with yet another enigma, and more and more frightened of the real role that Strangman played in his mind, Kerans systematically repressed his memories of the accident. Likewise, Bodkin and Beatrice ceased to refer to it, as if accepting that an answer to the question would solve for them many of the other mysterious enigmas which now alone sustained them, delusions which, like all the ambiguous but necessary assumptions about their own personalities, they would only sacrifice with reluctance.



CHAPTER 10

Surprise Party

"Kerans . . . !"
Roused by the deep blare of the hydroplane as it approached the landing stage, Kerans stirred fretfully, his head lolling from side to side on the stale pillow. He focussed his eyes on the bright green parallelograms which dappled the ceiling above the venetian blinds, listening to the engines outside reverse and accelerate, then with an effort pulled himself off the bed. It was already after 7-30, an hour later than he had woken a month earlier, and the brilliant sunlight reflected off the lagoon thrust its fingers into the darkened room like a ravenous golden monster.
With a pang of annoyance he noticed that he had forgotten to switch off the bedside fan before going to sleep. He had begun to fall asleep now at unpredictable moments, sometimes sitting halfupright on the bed while unlacing his shoes. In an attempt to conserve his fuel he had closed down the bedroom and moved the heavy gilt-framed double bed into the lounge, but its associations with sleep were so powerful that he was soon forced to move it back again.
"Kerans . . . !"
Strangman's voice echoed warningly down the corridor below. Kerans limped slowly to the bathroom, managed to splash his face by the time Strangman let himself into the suite.
Tossing his helmet on to the floor, Strangman produced a decanter of hot black coffee and a canned gorgonzola green with age.
"A present for you." He examined Kerans' dulled eyes with an amiable frown. 'Well, how are things in deep time?"
Kerans sat on the edge of the bed, waiting for the booming of the phantom jungles in his mind to fade. Like an endless shallows, the residues of the dreams stretched away below the surface of the reality around him. 'What brings you here?" he asked flatly.
Strangman put on an expression of deep injury.
"Kerans, I _like_ you. You keep forgetting that." He turned up the volume of the air-conditioner, smiling at Kerans, who gazed watchfully at the wry, perverted leer. "Actually I have another motive--I want you to have dinner with me tonight. Don't start shaking your bead. I have to keep coming here, it's time I returned your hospitality. Beatrice and old Bodkin will be there, it should be pretty swagger--firework displays, bongo drums and a surprise."
"What exactly?"
"You'll see. Something really spectacular, believe me, I don't do things by halves. I'd have those 'gators dancing on the tips of their tails if I wanted to." He nodded solemnly. "Kerans, you're going to be impressed. And it may even do you some good mentally, stop this crazy time machine of yours." His mood changed, becoming distant and abstracted. "But I mustn't poke fun at you, Kerans, I couldn't bear a tenth of the personal responsibility you've shouldered. The tragic loneliness, for example, of those haunted Triassic swamps." He picked a book off the air-conditioner, a copy of Donne's poems, and extemporised a line: 'World within world, each man an island unto himself, swimming through seas of archipelagoes. . . ."
Fairly certain that he was fooling, Kerans asked: "How's the diving going?"
"Frankly, not very well. The city's too far north for much to have been left. But we've discovered a few interesting things. You'll see tonight."
Kerans hesitated, doubting whether he would have enough energy to make small talk with Dr. Bodkin and Beatrice--he had seen neither of them since the debacle of the diving party, though every evening Strangman drove over in his hydroplane to Beatrice's apartment house (what success he had Kerans could only guess, but Strangman's references to her--"Women are like spiders, they sit there watching you and knitting their webs" or "she keeps talking about _you_, Robert, confound her"--indicated a negative response).
However, the particular twist of emphasis in Strangman's voice suggested that Kerans' attendance was obligatory, and that he would not be allowed to refuse. Strangman followed him into the lounge, waiting for a reply.
"It's rather short notice, Strangman."
"I'm terribly sorry, Kerans, but as we know each other so well I felt sure you wouldn't mind. Blame it on my manic-depressive personality, I'm always seizing on wild schemes."
Kerans found two gold-plated porcelain coffee cups and filled them from the decanter. Know each other so well, he repeated to himself ironically. I'm damned if I know you at all, Strangman. Racing around the lagoons like the delinquent spirit of the drowned city, apotheosis of all its aimless violence and cruelty, Strangman was half-buccaneer, half-devil. Yet he had a further neuronic role, in which he seemed almost a positive influence, holding a warning mirror up to Kerans and obliquely cautioning him about the future he had chosen. It was this bond that kept them together, for otherwise Kerans would long since have left the lagoon and moved southwards.
"I assume this isn't a farewell celebration?" he asked Strangman. "You aren't leaving us?"
"Kerans, of course not," Strangman remonstrated. "We've only just got here. Besides," he added sagely, "where would we go? There's nothing much left now--I can tell you, I sometimes feel like Phiebas the Phoenician. Though that's really your role, isn't it?