"R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 04" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

3

Well, did you ever watch the way the future comes out of its jug?
The jug is of smokey glass or rock crystal. Shapes and forms and movements
can be seen in there, and some of the details of it call be guessed. But it
is all distorted and deformed. It is the curvature of the smokey glass that
deforms the images. No future is ever seen undeformed.
But the globs of the future trying to get out will push each other
back, and there will be clotting at the mouth of the jug. Only thin juice
will roll out for a while. Then it will break loose and big hunk will come
out. But they are never quite as you imagined them to be when you peered
through the smokey glass.
Can one cheat to catch an earlier look at what is coming out? One
can try. There is a thin leading edge between the devouring present and the
waiting future. What happens if one is too eager and crosses this leading
edge? The world ends, for that person, for that while.
If this thin line is crossed, then one is out in the narrow interval
of unreality. It's a chancey though flexible place there.
Melchisedech Duffey and his history had come up to the absolute
present time, and then had gone a thumb's width beyond that, Duffey and his
nimbus had gone into the future then? No, they had gone into the shattering
state of contingency. It was a fracturing of reality. And it was a
fracturing of Melchisedech Duffey.
There has always been a quantity of unreality leaking out of the
future into the present. Then the unreality has to be negated, and the
reality revived. The reconstructing of reality is what is being talked about
when we talk about reconstructing the world.
Duffey had been into the future before, spottily, off and on, for
seven years once. And he had returned several times to those same seven
years. And yet it was not strictly speaking into the future. It was a
mixture of future and past and present. It was an interval or series of
intervals removed out of time and held apart. The intervals of Seven Years
did not necessarily count in regular time, which is why they could sometimes
be revisited. They did not fracture reality. They stood on the far side of
reality.
Melchisedech had been on the fourteenth voyage of the Ship Argo, and
this fourteenth voyage was technically in the future. And his own ashes had
been brought back to him from that future land. Anything brought back from
the future has unreality as a major component. Anyone who ever looked at or
handled Duffey's ashes with seeing eyes and sensing fingers knows something
about their index of unreality. Teresa the Showboat knew about their
unreality, but she believed that she was blowing them into real fire.
In a misbehaven case like this, when a complex over-runs itself, it
is shattered into a number of apocalypses or possible manifesting futures. A
number seven is often mentioned of these futures. Really, there is no limit
to the number of contingencies: but seven of them, like eager olives of
different sizes, seemed to be disputing the mouth of the jug. And the seven
most jostling ones were these:
"One". This is called, from a remnaiit of it that has been found
'The Great Day Contingency'. It is characterized by a bewildering