"C. L. Grant - The Rest Is Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

VERSION 1.0 dtd 032900



C. L. GRANT

The Rest Is Silence

C. L. Grant is executive secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
Like all SFWA's officers, he also is a working science fiction writer. He
lives in New Jersey, has a bachelor's degree in history, a wife, two years of
service in Vietnam, a teaching position in high school (until recently), and
has sold twenty-three science fiction stories in addition to the following
novelette, a story that suggests (like Tom Reamy's "Twills") that more goes on
in high school than any of us remember.
Beware of dreamers: that would be my epitaph if I could have a grave to go to
when 1 die. But all there is now is a rambling, shrinking house, and a fog
that wisps away my words as I speak. 1 have committed suicide (unaware) and
have been murdered for it (all too aware); but if I have to shift the
unbearable blame for this madness elsewhere, it has to go to Julius Caesar,
late of Rome and the Elizabethan state. After all, if he hadn't gotten himself
so famously killed, Shakespeare would have never written a play about it nor
would I have had to teach it. Yet he did, and 1 did, so here we are. And now I
know all too well just where that is.

After the fact, events have a diabolical way of falling into place that makes
a curse of hindsight and hell for the present. Case in point: a Wednesday in
October and a perfectly ordinary English Department meeting. Chandler Jolliet,
the commandingly tall chairman, was quietly and efficiently razoring our
confidence in our collective abilities. Apparently a virgin member of our
troupe had decided not to concentrate on Julius Caesar's examination of power,
but rather on the in-depth characterization of the conspirators, Brutus in
particular. God forbid that we should deviate from the chartered lanes of the
courses of study, but this youngster, fresh from college with stars in his
eyes, had taken it upon himself to do just that, and we were all suffering for
it. Jolliet's sycophants and friends were murmuring and nodding; and the rest
of us, who had endured this

brand of tirade before, were daydreaming, planning our Christmas vacations and
plotting assassinations of our own. And when the hour-and-a-half tantrum was
over, we nodded our heads in sage obeisance and shuffled out, as slaves must
have done before the overseer's whip. In the hall, however, the culprit, Marty
Schubert, cornered me and Valerie Stem to press his case.

"I don't understand, " he said. " What's so holy about Caesar that I can't
tally about something new for a change? I'm not saying Jollie's way is better
or worse, but for God's sake, what the hell does he have against me? What did
I do that he hates me?"

"Not a thing, " Val said, guiding him gently by the arm away from Jolliet's