"Bourne-GreatWorks" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bourne Mark)

Homer's seminal tale originated. Jessup threw up in the bookstore aisle.

Nobody even remembers seeing his original manuscripts. History is being cut and
pasted, and in an act of cosmic irony or bad humor, he's the only one who can
see the edits.

Is he the only one so chosen? Is history being rewritten in other ways by other
hands? If so, who would know it? Maybe there are dozens, hundreds of Jessups out
there, doing the editing and revising and the whiting-out. The typing pool of
the gods. Ha!

While writing The Old Man and the Sea, he recognized Hemingway's style on the
growing stack of pages. He was proud that he could capture the clean prose of
the man who wrote The Sun Also Rises. Last week, in bed, Alya told him that if
Hemingway had written Jessup's "wonderful fish story," the old fart probably
would have won that Nobel Prize after all. (That was before it was taken from
him, so of course she does not remember saying that.)

By then, though, he had convinced himself that the thefts were real, that he was
not insane. So, after saving the file for the last time, he refused to sleep,
even though his body fought him for it. He opened an old anthology from his
college days and, exhausted, he saw the change as it happened that time.

"I'm tired of being the ghost writer for the universe," he says quietly. He
cries himself to sleep while Alya strokes his hair. She wonders if she should
call a doctor.

After a while, she reaches for the TV's remote control and switches to the news
channel. Even with the sound low, she can tell what is happening. Dark-hooded
Reformists are shot as they pull a Sun off a neighborhood temple. One of the
Guard tells the camera that His Radiance should nuke the whole movement and let
"the big M" sort 'em out. Alya looks at Jessup, asleep with his head on her lap.
He mumbles something unintelligible, and stirs fretfully. Poor, sweet, paranoid
lover. Drunk, he once told her that he wanted his writing to change the world.
Alya clicks off the TV with a grunt of disgust. No wonder he cracked.

JESSUP IS awakened by the sound of bullets shattering glass. Alya is on the
floor, huddled behind a bookcase. For an awful moment, Jessup imagines she is
dead.

"Alya!"

She turns her head and presses a finger to her lips. "Ssshh!"

He listens. There are screams outside. The house across the street. A man
sobbing hysterically. A woman shouting. The piercing clap of gunfire. Running
footsteps. Silence.

"What's happening?" he whispers.