"Harlan Ellison - Stalking the Nightmare" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Thank you, Harlan. Thank you, man.
--Stephen King
Bangor, Maine
 INTRODUCTION:

Quiet Lies The Locust Tells
She thinks we were all killed when they made the Great Sweep, but I escaped in the mud.
I was there when the first dreams came off the assembly line. I was there when the corrupted visions that had
congealed in the vats were pincered up and hosed off and carried down the line to be dropped onto the rolling belts. I
was there when the first workmen dropped their faceplates and turned on their welding torches. I was there when they
began welding the foul things into their armor, when they began soldering the antennae, bolting on the wheels,
pouring in the eye-socket jelly. I was there when they turned the juice on them and I was there when the things began
to twitch.
No wonder She wanted all of us dead. Witnesses to their birth, to their construction, to their release into the
air--not good. The myrmidons were loosed on the Great Sweep.
I think I am the last one left alive. The last one who can create dreams and not nightmares. I am the locust.
The reversal is sweet. What we always knew to be nightmares--the empty lives, the twisted language, the
squeezing of the soul--they now call dreams. What we looked high to see as dreams--silliness, castles in the sky,
breathing deeply on windy afternoons--She has commanded be termed nightmares, lies. I am the locust. I tell quiet lies.
Called nightmares. That are truly fine dreams.
I swam in the mud till I was the color of the land. And made my escape. Overhead I saw the corrupted things
soaring off to spread their rigor of obedience and fear and hatred. For many days I lay there, hidden, turning on my
back for the rain, trapping small fish and insects for my food. Finally, when the Great Sweep was done and all my
brothers and sisters were dead or locked away in madhouses, I went to the forest.
But like the locust that the Middle Ages saw as the symbol of passion, I will live forever. I will tell my quiet
lies and no matter how blindly the people follow their instructions, in every generation there will be a hundred, perhaps
a thousand, if chance is with them even a hundred thousand, who will keep the quiet lies alive. To be told late at night
to the children. With their bright eyes they will pay attention, and the dreams that have been outlawed, now called
nightmares, will take root and spread.
And fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, when She thinks all courage has been drained out of the
people, the children of the locust will be retelling the quiet lies. We will never be eradicated. Decimated, yes, but still
we survive.
Because in us lives the noblest part of the human experiment. The ability to dream.
I’ve watched, since the Great Sweep. Oh, what wonders She has given them in place of what they had. They
have no real freedom, they have no genuine control of their lives, their days and nights are set down for them though
they don’t even perceive it that way. But She has given them endless flickering images on screens: surrogate dreams
(the real lies, the true nightmares) that make them laugh because they hear laughter behind the flickering images, and
scenes of death and destruction that they think are representations of the real world that She commands be termed
“news.” She has given them more and greater sporting events, young men and women hurling themselves at each
other in meaningless contests She tells them represent survival in microcosm. She has given them fashions that
obsess them--though they do not understand that the fashions are one more way of making them facsimiles of each
other. She has given them acts of government that unify them into hive groups, in the name of removing responsibility
from their daily lives. She has taken control completely, and now they believe that the grandest role they can play is
that of cog in the machine of Her design. In truth, what they have become are prisoners of their own lives.
All that stands between them and the shambling walk of the zombie are the quiet lies the locust tells.

Because I keep on the move, I have come to miss two aspects of human congress more than all the others
combined. Love and friendship. Before the Great Sweep I never had the time or the perseverance to discover what
raids love can make on the boredom of silent days spent alone. Nights are worse, of course.
I long to share confidences with a friend. But because I have placed myself outside the limits of their society,