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

The dead live; the living are dead, all slide and become
jumbled together as she has noted; and were it not that their
objective poles of consciousness were fixed by years of training
and discipline, just as hers are transfixed by a different kind of
training and discipline, she would press the levers to eject the
dead one-by-one into the larger coffin of space, something
which is indicated only as an emergency procedure under the
gravest of terms and which would result in her removal from the
Bureau immediately upon her return. The dead are precious
cargo; they are, in essence, paying for the experiments and
must be handled with the greatest delicacy. “I will handle you
with the greatest delicacy,” Lena says in hyperspace, “and I will
never let you go, little packages in my little prison,” and so on,

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 A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg



singing and chanting as the ship moves on somewhat in excess
of one million miles per second, always accelerating; and yet,
except for the colors, the nausea, the disorienting swing, her
own mounting insanity, the terms of this story, she might be in
the IRT Lenox Avenue local at rush hour, moving slowly uptown
as circles of illness move through the fainting car in the bowels
of summer.

VI


She is twenty-eight years old. Almost two hundred years in the
future, when man has established colonies on forty planets in
the Milky Way, has fully populated the solar system, is working
in the faster-than-light experiments as quickly as he can to
move through other galaxies, the medical science of that day is
not notably superior to that of our own, and the human lifespan

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 A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg



has not been significantly extended, nor have the diseases of
mankind which are now known as congenital been eradicated.
Most of the embalmed were in their eighties or nineties; a few of
them, the more recent deaths, were nearly a hundred, but the
average lifespan still hangs somewhat short of eighty, and most
of these have died from cancer, heart attacks, renal failure,
cerebral blowout, and the like. There is some irony in the fact
that man can have at least established a toehold in his galaxy,