"Harlan Ellison - Paingod & Other Delusions" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

concern, discomfort, age, time, feeling.
And this was as the Ethos had planned it.
For Trente had been appointed by the Ethos-the race of somewhere/somewhen beings who morally and
ethically ruled the universes-as their Paingod. To Trente, who knew neither the tug of time nor the crippling demands
of the emotions, fell the forever task of dispensing pain and sorrow to the myriad multitudes of creatures that inhabited
the universe. Whether sentient or barely capable of the feeblest unicellular reaction-formation, Trente passed along
from his faceted cubicle invisible against the backdrop of the changing stars, unhappiness and misery in proportions
too complexly arrived at to be verbalized.
He was Paingod for the universes, the one who dealt out the tears and the anguish and the soul-wrenching
terrors that blighted life from its first moment to its last. Beyond age, beyond death, beyond feeling-lonely and alone in
his cubicle-Trente went about his business without concern or pause.
Trente was not the first Paingod; there had been others. They had come before, not too many of them, but a
few, and why they no longer held their post was a question Trente had never asked. He was the chosen one from a
race that lived almost indefinitely, and his job was to pass along the calibrated and measured dollops of melancholy as
prescribed by the Ethos. It involved no feeling and no concern, only attention to duty. It was his position, and it was
his obligation. How peculiar it was that he felt concern, after all this time.
It had begun so long before-and of time he had no conception-that the only marking date with validity was
that in the great ocean soon to become the Gobi Desert, paramecia had become more prevalent than amoebae. It had
grown in him through the centimetered centuries as layers and layers of forever settled down like mist to form the
strata of the past.
Now, it was now.

Despite the strange ache in his nerve-gland, his central nerve-gland; despite the progressive dulling of his
eye globes; despite the mad thoughts that spat and stuttered through his triple-domed cerebrum, thoughts of which
he knew he was incapable, Trente performed his now functions as he was required:
He dispensed unbearable anguish to the residents of a thirdpower planet in the Snail Cluster, supportable
agony to a farm colony that had sprung up on Jacopettii U, incredible suffering to a parentless spider-child on Hiydyg
IX, and relentless torment to a blameless race of mute aborigines on a nameless, arid planet circling a dying sun of the
707 System.
And through it all, Trente suffered for his charges.
What could not be, was. What could not come to pass, had. The soulless, emotionless, regimented creature
that the Ethos had named Paingod had contracted a sickness. Concern. At last, after centuries too filed away to
unearth and codify, Trente had reached a Now in which he could no longer support his acts. He cared.
The physical manifestations of his mental upheaval were numerous. His oblong head throbbed and his eye
globes were dulling, a little more each decade; the interlinked duodenal ulcers so necessary to his endocrinal system’s
normal function had begun to misfire like faulty plugs in an old car; the thwack! of his salamander tail had grown
weaker, indicating his motor responses to nerve endings were feebler. Trente-who had always been considered rather
a handsome example of his race-had slowly come to look forlorn, weary, even a touch pathetic.
And he sent down woe to an armored, flying creature with a mite-sized brain on a dark planet at the edge of
the Coalsack; he dispatched fear and trembling to a smoke-like wraith that was the only visible remains of a great race
that had learned to dispense with its bodies centuries before, in the sun known as Vertel; he conscientiously winged
terror and unhappiness and misery and sadness to a group of murdering pirates, a clique of shrewd politicians and a
brothelful of unregenerate whores-all on a fifth-power planet of the White Horse Constellation.
Stopped alone there, in the night of space, his mind spiraling now for the first time down a strange and
disquieting chamber of thought, Trente twisted within himself. I was selected because I lacked the certain difficulties I
now manifest. What is this torment? What is this unpleasant, unhappy, unrelenting feeling that gnaws at me, tears at
me, corrupts my thoughts, colors darkly my every desire? Am I going mad? Madness is beyond my race; it is a
something we have never known. Have I been at this post too long, have I failed in my duties? If there was a God
stronger than the God that I am, or a God stronger than the Ethos Gods, then I would appeal to that God. But there is
only silence and the night and the stars, and I’m alone, so alone, so God all alone here, doing what I must, doing my