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

IT WAS ALL CONTAINED in the suit of lights. All of time, and the ability to
drift backward, all of it built into the refined mechanism the academics called
a driftsuit, but which we "fugitives" called our suit of lights. Like a
toreador's elegant costume, it was a glittering, gleaming, shining second-skin.
All the circuits were built in, printed deep in the ceramic metal garment. It
was a specially-developed cermet, pliable ceramic metal, not like the armor worn
by our astronauts mining the Asteroid Belt. Silver and reflective, crosstar
flares at a million points of arm and torso and hooded skull.

We had learned, in this time of miracles, that matter and energy are
interchangeable; and that a person can be broken down into energy waves; and
those waves can be fired off into the timestream, toward the light. Time did,
indeed, sweep backward, and one could drift backward, going ever toward that
ultimate light that we feared to enter. Not because of superstition, but because
we all understood on a level we could not explain, that the light was the start
of it all, perhaps the Big Bang itself.

But we could go fugitive, drift back and back, even to the dawn of life on this
planet. And we could return, but only to the moment we had left. We could not go
forward, which was just as well. Literally, the information that was us could be
fired out backward through the timestream as wave data.

And the miracle was that it was all contained in the suit of lights. Calibrate
it on the wrist-cuff, thumb the "activate" readout that was coded to the DNA of
only the three of us who were timedrifters, and no matter where we stood, we
turned to smoke, turned to light, imploded into a scintillant point, and
vanished, to be fired away, and to reassemble as ourselves at the shore of the
Sea of Reeds as the Egyptians were drowned, in the garden of Gethsemane on the
night of Jesus's betrayal, in the crowd as Chicago's Mayor Cermak was
assassinated by a demented immigrant trying to get a shot at Franklin D.
Roosevelt, in the right field bleachers as the Mets won the World Series.

I thumbed the readout and saw only light, nothing but light, golden as a dream,
eternal as a last breath, and I hurtled back toward the light that was greater
than this light that filled me . . .

. . . and in a moment I stood in the year 165 Before the Christian Era, within
the burned gates of the Second Temple, on the Mount in Jerusalem. It was the
24th day of the Hebrew month Kislev. 165 BCE. The slaughtered dead of the
Greco-Syrian army of Antiochus lay ten deep outside. The swordsmen of the Yovan,
who had stabled pigs in the Beis Ha Mikdosh, even in the holiest of holies, who
had defiled the sanctuary which housed the menorah, who had had sex on the
stones of the sacred altar, and profaned those stones with urine and swine . . .
they lay with new, crimson mouths opened in their necks, with iron protruding
from their bellies and backs.

Ex-college boy from Chicago, timedrifter, fugitive. It had seemed like a good
idea at the time. I never dreamed this kind of death could be . . . with bodies
that had not been decently straightened for display in small boxes . . . with