"04 - Mirror of Ice by Gary Wright" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

/ had only read two stories by Gary Wright prior to this one,
and each of them has spoken to me in the words of Antoine
de Saint-Exupery, when he was on the Toulouse-Dakar line:
Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to
blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a
termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement
every chink and cranny through which the light might
pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel
security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provin-
cial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and
the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be
perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to
forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller
upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions
to which there are no answers. You are a petty bourgeois
of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while
there was still time. Now the clay of which you were
shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will
ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the as-
tronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.*
Here is a story of freedom, violence, Angst. I will not insult
the author by comparing him to someone elselike, say,.
Hemingway. No. He is himself. And he has written a man
against the elements story, which I feel belongs right here.
After Bollard's magical shadow-play in the sky and Harlan's
jazz-discord finale, here is something as cold and clean as a
bottle of akvavit frozen into a block of ice, or the winds that
lash the highest mountains.
MIRROR OF ICE

Gary Wright

They called it The Stuka. It was a tortuous, twenty-kilometer
path of bright ice, and in that distance12.42 milesit
dropped 7,366 feet, carving a course down the alpine moun-
tainside like the track of a great snake. It was thirty feet wide
on the straights with corners curling as high as forty feet. It
was made for sleds. . ..
He waited in the narrow cockpit and listened to the wind.
It moaned along the frozen shoulder of the towering white
peak and across the steep starting ramp, pushing along stream-
ers of snow out against the hard blue sky, and he could hear
it cry inside him with the same cold and lonely sound.
He was scared. And what was worsehe knew it.
Forward, under the sleek nose of his sled, the mountaia
fell away abruptlystraight down, it seemedand the valley
was far below. So very far.
. . . too far this time, buddyboy, too far forever . . .
The countdown light on the dash flickered a sudden blood