"Barry Longyear - Dark Corners" - читать интересную книгу автора (Longyear Barry)

What was it? Numbers, policy, politics, habit, arbitrary rules? I was caught in a bind, assaulted by rubber
stamps, there had been that embarrassment before the Foreign Relations Committee, that dressing down
by the Secretary, and then someone had died.

Someone had died.

Dear, dear someone. Dear, dear one. Are you the one I fear to remember? Are you the one I walk Hell
trying to forget?

Then there were great gaps torn into my memory; then the hospital and Hicks. Then came the Misty
Man. The creature asked me what I wanted to do about it.

“About what?” I asked the thing.

“About life, the planet, the universe, things.” The voice was level, devoid of emotion. There were muted
lights within the mist. The lights were the emotions the mind words couldn’t feel. The Misty Man cared
about me. It cared about what I thought, what I wanted, about the ocean of pain in which I was
drowning.

I was scared. It was the only time I ever thought I was crazy. My need, though, drove me toward the
creature. The Misty Man listened to my pain. It told me how it suffered. It asked me things: How is my
time? There are no days, no nights, in the Misty Man’s reality. Only mass and time.

The Misty Man was isolated from its kind, removed from its body and held in a field that rendered it
powerless in its own dimension. My pain had driven my mind into the Misty Man’s dimension. There I
have the power.

“Through you,” said the Misty Man, “I can have power again. Through me, you can have power again.
We can have power through each other.”

If it is true, there is something I can do about my day, my year, my existence. I can bring back to life
those who should have never died. I can kill those who should have never been born.

“Are these things we can do?” I had asked the Misty Man.

The creature didn’t know. We would have to try out our powers through each other and see.

“You have already slain someone for me,” the Misty Man said. It was a caretaker the shadow hated: the
shadow’s Hicks. “You wanted to kill your caretaker and instead you killed mine. We must have other
ways to serve ourselves by serving each other. Shall I kill your caretaker?”

I didn’t want Hicks killed. Not just right then. But it made me feel strong. It was my choice. Life or death
for Hicks became my choice. He could be brought down with nothing more than my wish.




“You’re repressing the memory of what you’ve done,” says the doctor. “What you did was so
unacceptable to your own moral sense, your mind refuses to admit to it. It’s a very common survival