"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Some hundreds of years may have passed. I don’t know. AM has been having fun for some time,
accelerating and retarding my time sense. I will say the word “now.” Now. It took me ten months to say
“now.” I don’t know. I think it has been some hundreds of years.
He was furious. He wouldn’t let me bury them. It didn’t matter. There was no way to dig in the
deckplates. He dried up the snow. He brought the night. He roared and sent locusts. It didn’t do a thing;
they stayed dead. I’d had him. He was furious. I had thought AM hated me before. I was wrong. It is not
even a shadow of the hate he now slavers from every printed circuit. He made certain I would suffer
eternally and could not do myself in.
He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. I remember all four of them. I
wish
Well, it doesn’t make any sense. I know I saved them, I know I saved them from what has
happened to me, but still, I cannot forget killing them. Ellen’s face. It isn’t easy. sometimes I want to, it
doesn’t matter.
AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed
into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet
of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself :
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by
fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into
legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray
come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.
Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing
whose shape is so alien a travesty, that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.
Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created
because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At
least the four of them are safe at last.
AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet...AM has won,
simply...he has taken his revenge...
I have no mouth. And I must scream.
 The Discarded
BEDZYK SAW RIILA GO MAD, and watched her throw herself against the lucite port, till her pinhead was a
red blotch of pulped flesh and blood. He sighed, and sucked deeply from his massive bellows chest, and
wondered how he, of all the Discards, had been silently nominated the leader. The ship hung in space,
between the Moon and Earth, unwanted, unnoticed, a raft adrift in the sea of night.
Around him in the ship’s saloon, the others watched Riila killing herself, and when her body fell
to the rug, they turned away, allowing Bedzyk his choice of who was to dispose of her. He chose John
Smith-the one with feathers where hair should have been-and the nameless one who clanged instead of
talking.
The two of them lifted her heavy body, with its tiny pea of head, and carried it to the garbage port.
They emptied it, opened it, tossed her inside, redogged and blew her out. She floated past the saloon
window on her way sunward. In a moment she was lost.
Bedzyk sat down in a deep chair and drew breath whistlingly into his mighty chest. It was a chore,
being leader of these people.
People? No, that was certainly not the word. These Discards. That was a fine willowy word to use.
They were scrap, refuse, waste, garbage themselves. How fitting for Riila to have gone that way, out the
garbage port. They would all bid goodbye that way some day. He noted there was no “day” on the ship. But
some good something-maybe day, maybe night-each of them would go sucking out that port like the