"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

he spiraled deeper into the Tongue of the Ocean, pressed to the breasts of the
woman-fish, it grew even warmer. Lying out in an August hammock warm. And the
invitation of thunder grew louder. Perhaps hundreds of meters above them as they
fell into infinite shadow, the great crimson waterfall roared as it spilled its
raging body out of that impossible vacuum hole. But the thunder was not from the
impossible avalanche of gallons above them. It came from below in the bottomless
deep. Lanfear's listening DNA clocked every insinuation, every nuance. And then,
when the fragile sack of blood that was his human body should have come unseamed
and split, at a depth no surface creature could call home, he began to dissolve.

Dennis Lanfear, hands empty, mind clutching no more than muted memories of the
crashed, dead father he had never been privileged to know, began to dissolve in
a world of crimson water, a world of red thunder.

He had feared he would die as his father had died, in the jaws of unbearable
pounds per square inch, but it was not to be. The self-fulfilling prophecy --
will I outlive the years allotted to my father --he died at forty-four, will I
live to be fifty -- the unspoken fear that numbs all men -- was eluded.

Dennis Lanfear did not crash under the heel of the deep, he merely dissolved.
Molecule by molecule, atom by atom, submicroscopic electrical pulse by invisible
swimming flux, he was carried down in the mermaid's arms toward the twin of the
booming vacuum hole far above . . . a quiet yet susurrating void as black and
empty of identity as the matrix of a thresher shark's eye. His every instant was
culled, harvested, codified . . . and sucked into the vacuum hole as the
guardian of the portal, the watcher of the Bermuda Triangle abyss, who had
hauled such cargo uncounted times in her thousand-year existence, released his
mortal flesh in its puny diving suit fabricated in 1922 in a city of a nation
that had not existed for one-tenth her lifespan. She smiled, and swam away in
the warm.

And the essence of Lanfear was carried away, into the dead emotionless vacuum
eye of an abyss that lived, as the shark lives, only to feed.

The light that came to his skin from the end of the universe was white and pure
and bright; but the water around him as he came to the surface of the great lake
pool was a chromatic sibling of red and pink and amber that no eye on Earth had
ever seen. It registered in that vast and desolate cerebral Sahara within the
parietal lobe where nothing can grow. There, in the unfathomable desolation of
the primary sensory cortex, whose functions are the Bermuda Triangle of the
brain's potential, such hues and shades as composed the gently rippling waters
as his throbbing head broke the surface, had meaning and identity. In that alien
landscape of the mind, to which no human being had ever retained valid passport,
the spectrum was wider, broader, deeper, and sang with a brighter resonance.

The copper diving helmet was gone. Dispensed with. Somewhere behind him in the
passage through the thunderingly silent drain of the vacuum hole. Perhaps its
atoms had been dispersed in a cloudy shower saturating the life-heavy waters off
the Grand Bahama Banks. Perhaps they had been fired away in a narrow-focus
stream, like a lightless laser beam, as he was disassembled, broken-down,