"Barry N. Malzberg - A Galaxy Called Rome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

perform in her imagination or in the flesh gross physical acts
upon herself; she could live and die a thousand times in the
lightless, timeless expanse of the pit ... all of this could be done
within the confines of the story, and it would doubtless lead to
some very powerful material. One could do it picaresque
fashion, one perversity or lunacy to a chapter—that is to say,
the chapters spliced together with more data on the
gravitational excesses and the fact that neutron stars (this is
interesting) are probably the pulsars which we have identified,
stars which can be detected through sound but not by sight from
unimaginable distances. The author could do this kind of thing,

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and do it very well indeed; he has done it literally hundreds of
times before, but this, perhaps, would be in disregard of Lena.
She has needs more imperative than those of the author, or
even those of the editors. She is in terrible pain. She is
suffering.
Falling, she sees the dead; falling, she hears the dead; the
dead address her from the hold, and they are screaming,
“Release us, release us, we are alive, we are in pain, we are in
torment"; in their gelatinous flux, their distended limbs sutured
finger and toe to the membranes which hold them, their decay
has been reversed as the warp into which they have fallen has
reversed time; and they are begging Lena from a torment which
they cannot phrase, so profound is it; their voices are in her
head, pealing and banging like oddly shaped bells. “Release us!”
they scream, “we are no longer dead, the trumpet has

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sounded!” and so on and so forth, but Lena literally does not
know what to do. She is merely the ferryman on this dread
passage; she is not a medical specialist; she knows nothing of
prophylaxis or restoration, and any movement she made to
release them from the gelatin which holds them would surely
destroy their biology, no matter what the state of their minds.
But even if this were not so, even if she could by releasing
them give them peace, she cannot because she is succumbing to
her own responses. In the black hole, if the dead are risen, then
the risen are certainly the dead; she dies in this space, Lena
does; she dies a thousand times over a period of seventy
thousand years (because there is no objective time here,