"Gardner Dozois & Jack Haldeman - Executive Clemency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

file:///D|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Dozois,%20Gardner%20&%20Jack%20Haldeman%20-%20Executive%20Clemency.txt


EXECUTIVE CLEMENCY
By Gardner Dozois and Jack C. Haldeman II
The President of the United States sat very still in his overstuffed chair on the third floor and
watched early morning sunlight sweep in a slow line across the faded rug.
He couldn't remember getting out of bed or sitting down in the chair. He could dimly recall that
he had been sitting there for a long time, watching the slow advent of dawn, but he was only just
beginning to become fully aware of himself and his surroundings.
Only his eyes moved, yellow and wet, as the world seeped in.
This happened to him almost every morning now. Every morning he would return slowly to his body as
if from an immense distance, from across appalling gulfs of time and space, to find himself
sitting in the chair, or standing next to the window, or, more rarely, propped up in the corner
against the wall. Sometimes he'd be in the middle of dressing when awareness returned, and he'd
awake to find himself tying a shoelace or buttoning his pants. Sometimes,
like this morning, he'd just be sitting and staring. Other times he would awaken to the sound of
his own voice, loud and cold in the bare wooden room, saying some strange and important things
that he could never quite catch. If he could only hear the words he said at such times, just once,
he knew that it would change everything, that he would understand everything. But he could never
hear them.
He didn't move. When the lines of sunlight reached the chair, it would be time to go downstairs.
Not before, no matter how late it sometimes made him as the sunlight changed with the seasons, no
matter if he sometimes missed breakfast or, on cloudy winter days, didn't move at all until Mrs.
Hamlin came upstairs to chase him out. It was one of the rituals with which he tried to hold his
life together.
The east-facing window was washed over with pale, fragile blue, and the slow-moving patch of
direct sunlight was a raw, hot gold. Dust motes danced in the beam. Except for those dust motes,
everything was stillness and suspension. Except for his own spidery breathing, everything was
profoundly silent. The room smelled of dust and heat and old wood. It was the best part of the
day. Naturally it couldn't last.
Very far away, floating on the edge of hearing, there 'came the mellow, mossy bronze voice of a
bell, ringing in the village of Fairfield behind the ridge, and at that precise moment, as though
the faint tintinnabulation were its cue, the house itself began to speak. It was a rambling wooden
house, more than a hundred years old, and it talked to itself at dawn and dusk, creaking,
groaning, whispering, muttering like a crotchety old eccentric as its wooden bones expanded with
the sun or contracted with the frost. This petulant, arthritic monologue ran on for a
few minutes, and then the tenants themselves joined in, one by one: Seth in the bathroom early,
spluttering as he washed up; Mr. Thompkins, clearing his throat interminably in the room below,
coughing and hacking and spitting as though he were drowning in a sea of phlegm; Sadie's baby,
crying in a vain attempt to wake her sluggard mother; Mrs. Hamlin, slamming the kitchen door; Mr.
Samuels's loud nasal voice in the courtyard outside.
The sunlight swept across his chair.
The President of the United States stirred and sighed, lifting his arms and setting them down
again, stamping his feet to restore circulation. Creakily he got up. He stood for a moment,
blinking in the sudden warmth, willing life back into his bones. His arms were gnarled and thin,
covered, like his chest, with fine white hair that polarized in the sunlight. He rubbed his hands
over his arms to smooth out gooseflesh, pinched the bridge of his nose, and stepped across to the
gable window for a look outside. It seemed wrong somehow to see the neat, tree-lined streets of
Northview, the old wooden houses, the tiled roofs, the lines of smoke going up black and fine from