"Greg Egan - Our Lady of Chernobyl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

Our Lady of Chernobyl

Greg Egan
A DF Books NERD’s Release

Copyright ©1994 by Greg Egan

Interzone #83, May 1994
Thanks to Caroline Oakley, Anthony Cheetham, John Douglas, Peter Robinson, Kate Messenger, Philip
Patterson, Tony Gardner, Russ Galen, David Pringle, Lee Montgomerie, Gardner Dozois, Sheila
Williams, and Bill Congreve.



We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or
beauty anywhere upon earth.

—The envoy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, describing the Church of the Divine Wisdom in Constantinople,
987.


It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

—S.L. Clemens, ditto, 1867.
****
Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanor and puffy complexion of an insomniac. I'd picked him as a
man who'd begun to ask himself, around two a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the
lover of her dreams in an industrialist three times her age—however witty, however erudite, however
wealthy. I hadn't followed his career in any detail, but his most famous move had been to buy the entire
superconducting cables division of Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in ‘09. He was
impeccably dressed in a gray silk suit, the cut precisely old-fashioned enough to be stylish, and he looked
like he'd once been strikingly handsome. A perfect candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and
belated second thoughts.

I was wrong. What he said was: “I want you to locate a package for me.”

“A package?” I did my best to sound fascinated—although if adultery was stultifying, lost property was
worse. “Missingen route from—?”

“Zürich.”

“To Milan?”

“Of course!” Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he might have been shipping his precious cargo
elsewhere, intentionally, caused him physical pain.

I said carefully, “Nothing is ever really lost. You might find that a strongly-worded letter from your
lawyers to the courier is enough to work miracles.”

Masini smiled humorlessly. “I don't think so. The courier is dead.”