"Harlan Ellison - Toward The Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

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
hands that reached for the bodies that had once worn them. Faces without eyes.

I stood in the rubble of the most legendary structure in the history of my
people, and realized this had not been, in any way, a good idea. Sick to my
stomach, I started to thumb my wrist-cuff, to return now to the Project labs.

And I heard the scream.

And I turned my head.

And I saw the Kohane, who had been sent on ahead to assess the desecration -- a
son of Mattisyahu -- I saw him flung backward and pinned to the floor of dirt
and pig excrement, impaled by the spear of a Syrian pikeman who had been hiding
in the shadows. Deserter of the citadel's garrison, a coward hiding in the
shadows. And as he strode forward to finish the death of the writhing priest, I

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charged, grabbed up one of the desecrated stones of the altar and, as he turned
to stare at me, frozen in an instant at the sight of this creature of light
bearing down on him . . . I raised the jagged rock and crushed his face to pulp.

Dying, the Kohane looked upon me with wonder. He murmured prayers and my suit of
lights shone in his eyes. I spoke to him in Greek, but he could not understand
me. And then in Latin, both formal and vulgate, but his whispered responses were
incomprehensible to me. I could not speak his language!

I tried Parthian, Samarian, Median, Cuthian, even Chaldean and Sumerian . . .