"Gardner Dozois - A Dream at Noonday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

A DREAM AT NOONDAY
by Gardner Dozois


I remember the sky, and the sun burning in the sky like a golden penny flicked into a deep
blue pool, and the scuttling white clouds that changed into magic ships and whales and
turreted castles as they drifted up across that bottomless ocean and swam the equally
bottomless sea of my mind’s eye. I remember the winds that skimmed the clouds, smoothing
and rippling them into serene grandeur or boiling them into froth. I remember the same wind
dipping low to caress the grass, making it sway and tremble, or whipping through the
branches of the trees and making them sing with a wild, keening organ note. I remember the
silence that was like a bronzen shout echoing among the hills.

—It is raining. The sky is slate-gray and grittily churning. It looks like a soggy dishrag being
squeezed dry, and the moisture is dirty rain that falls in pounding sheets, pressing down the
tall grass. The rain pocks the ground, and the loosely packed soil is slowly turning into mud
and the rain spatters the mud, making it shimmer—

And I remember the trains. I remember lying in bed as a child, swathed in warm blankets,
sniffing suspiciously and eagerly at the embryonic darkness of my room, and listening to the
big trains wail and murmur in the freight yard beyond. I remember lying awake night after
night, frightened and darkly fascinated, keeping very still so that the darkness wouldn’t see
me, and listening to the hollow booms and metallic moans as the trains coupled and linked
below my window. I remember that I thought the trains were alive, big dark beasts who
came to dance and to hunt each other through the dappled moonlight of the world outside
my room, and when I would listen to the whispering clatter of their passing and feel the room
quiver ever so slightly in shy response, I would get a crawly feeling in my chest and a
prickling along the back of my neck, and I would wish that I could watch them dance,
although I knew that I never would. And I remember that it was different when I watched the
trains during the daytime, for then even though I clung tight to my mother’s hand and stared
wide-eyed at their steam-belching and spark-spitting they were just big iron beasts putting on
a show for me; they weren’t magic then, they were hiding the magic inside them and
pretending to be iron beasts and waiting for the darkness. I remember that I knew even then
that trains are only magic in the night and only dance when no one can see them. And I
remember that I couldn’t go to sleep at night until I was soothed by the muttering lullaby of
steel and the soft, rhythmical hiss-clatter of a train booming over a switch. And I remember
that some nights the bellowing of a fast freight or the cruel, whistling shriek of a train’s
whistle would make me tremble and feel cold suddenly, even under my safe
blanket-mountain, and I would find myself thinking about rain-soaked ground and blood
and black cloth and half-understood references to my grandfather going away, and the
darkness would suddenly seem to curl in upon itself and become diamond-hard and press
down upon my straining eyes, and I would whimper and the fading whistle would snatch the
sound from my mouth and trail it away into the night. And I remember that at times like that
I would pretend that I had tiptoed to the window to watch the trains dance, which I never
really dared to do because I knew I would die if I did, and then I would close my eyes and
pretend that I was a train, and in my mind’s eye I would be hanging disembodied in the
darkness a few inches above the shining tracks, and then the track would begin to slip along
under me, slowly at first then fast and smooth like flowing syrup, and then the darkness
would be flashing by and then I would be moving out and away, surrounded by the wailing
roar and evil steel chuckling of a fast freight slashing through the night, hearing my whistle