"021 - Dick, Philip K - Counter Clock World v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

And if I can't get the information from her, the Erad can.









8


Matter itself (apart from the forms it receives) is likewise invisible and even indefinable.
--Erigena



In the work area of the Flask of Hermes Vitarium, Dr. Sign listened intently with a stethoscope placed on the unimpressive dark chest of the body of the Anarch Thomas Peak.
"Anything?" Sebastian asked. He felt extremely tense.
"Not so far. But at this stage it frequently comes and goes; this is critical, this period. All the components have migrated back into place and resumed the capacity to function, but the--" Sign gestured. "Wait. Maybe I've got it." He glanced at the instruments which mechanically registered pulse, respiration and cephalic activity; all traced and blipped unwavering lines.
"A body's a body," Bob Lindy said dispassionately; he showed by his expression the dim view he took of all this. "A deader is dead, whether he's the Anarch or not, and whether he's five minutes or five centuries away from rebirth."
Reading from a slip of paper, Sebastian said aloud, "Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi. Expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruinas.' Those last are the key words:'putresque ruinas.'"
"What's that from?" Dr. Sign asked.
"The monument. I copied it off. The epitaph for him." He gestured at the body.
"My Latin isn't much good outside medical terminology," Dr. Sign said, "but I can pick up on the terms putrify and ruin. But he doesn't look it, does he?" He, Lindy and Sebastian viewed the body for a short time in silence. Small as it was it looked complete, ready for life. What's keeping it, Sebastian wondered, from resuming life?
Father Faine said, "No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings--the things thus grow until we know and name them. By degrees they melt, and are no more the things we know.'"
"What's that?" Sebastian asked him; he had yet to hear rhymed couplets from the Bible.
"A translation of the first quatrain of the Anarch's epitaph. It's a poem of Titus Lucretius Carus--Lucretius who wrote _De Rerum Natura_. Didn't you recognize it, Seb?"
"No," he admitted.
"Maybe," Lindy said caustically, "if you recite it backward, he'll return to life; maybe that's how you're supposed to handle this." He turned his hostility directly on Sebastian. "I don't like trying to bring a corpse back to life; it's completely different from hearing a live person who's trapped underground in the box, and hauling him up."
"A difference," Sebastian said, "only in time. A matter of days or hours, maybe minutes. You just don't like to think about it."
Lindy said brutally, "Do you spend much of your time, Seb, remembering the days when you were a corpse? Do you think about that?"
"There's nothing to think about," he answered. "I had no awareness after death; I went from the hospital to the coffin and I woke up in the coffin." He added, "I remember that; I think about that." After all he still had claustrophobia because of that. Many old-borners did; it constituted their shared pyschological ailment.
"I guess," Cheryl Vale, watching from a distance, said, "this disproves God and the Afterlife. What you said, Seb; about not having any awareness after you died."
"No more so," Sebastian said, "than the absence of preuterine memories disproves Buddhism."
"Sure," R.C. Buckley put in. "Just because the old-borners can't remember doesn't mean nothing happened; like a lot of times in the morning I know I've dreamed like hell all night but I can't remember a damn thing about them, not anything at all."
"Sometimes," Sebastian said, "I have dreams."
"About what?" Bob Lindy asked.
"A sort of forest."
"And that's all?" Lindy demanded.
"One other." He hesitated, then said it. "A pulsating black presence, beating like a huge heart. Enormous and loud, going thump, thump, rising and falling, in and out. And very angry. Burning out everything in me it disapproves of . . . and that seemed to be most of me."
"Dies Irae," Father Faine said. "The Day of Wrath." He did not seem surprised. Sebastian had talked with him about it before.
Sebastian said, "And a sense on my part of it being so alive. It was absolutely living. By comparison--we're a spark of life in a lump that isn't alive, that the spark makes move around and talk and act. But this was totally aware; not out of eyes or ears, just aware."
"Paranoia," Dr. Sign murmured. "The sense of being watched."
"What was it angry at you about?" Cheryl asked.
He pondered, then said, "I wasn't small enough."
"'Small enough,'" Bob Lindy echoed in disgust. "Feood."
"It was right," Sebastian said. "I was in reality much smaller than I realized. Or admitted; I liked to think I was larger, with large ambitions." Like seizing the Anarch's corpse, he thought wryly. And trying to cash in big; that was an example, a perfect one. He hadn't learned.
"Why," Cheryl persisted, "did it want you to be small?"