"izzy-and-the-father-of-terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fintushel Eliot)

Izzy and the Father of Terror
by Eliot Fintushel

First appeared in Asimov's Science
Fiction, July 1997. Nominated for Best
Novella.

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He who feels punctured
Must once have been a bubble.

-Lao Tze (trans. Witter Bynner)



ONE



1. A Hole in My Mind

I was thumbing through New Mexico with
nothing, headed nowhere, when I fell in
with a shaman named Shaman who pricked a
hole in my mind. A little prick it was,
but everything gushed in through it, and
everything spilled out. Suddenly, I could
not tell the difference between myself and
others or between my body and the rest of
the world.

"Don't be afraid, Mel," Shaman said. I was
very afraid. We were sitting inside a long
canvas tent, the communal kitchen of the
Space People. All the other Space People
were asleep. They had picked me up outside
of Albuquerque and driven me out onto the
desert to their little spread. Because
Shaman liked me, they had picked me up.
Even though there were Chicanos in those
days who hated hippies, who conned their
way into communes and shot them up, and I
am as dark-skinned and small as a Mexican,
they had picked me up.

It was dark in the tent. Flaps open, stars
filled the big triangles at either end;
feeble candlelight unsealed the night
between us, loud with cicadas and dead