"Edgar Pangborn - A Master of Babylon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

"What thou lowest well remains; the rest is dross." As poetry this line is compelling, but like
many such mottoes it might be hard to live by. Mr. Pangborn shucks away "the rest," leaving
behind only a love of music, and asks—in the high ultra-violet poetry peculiar to him—how much
life might indeed remain. He is not, of course, the first to no-tice that performers lead a borrowed
life, but suppos-ing the borrowed life is all that's left; how then shall a man live?

A MASTER OF BABYLON
by
Edgar Pangborn

For twenty-five years no one came.
In the seventy-sixth year of his life Brian Van Anda was still trying not to remember a happy
boyhood. To do so was irrelevant and dangerous, although every instinct of his old age tempted him to
reject the pre-sent and live in the lost times. He would recall stubbornly that the present year, for
example, was 2096 according to the Christian calendar, that he had been born in 2020, seven years after
the close of the civil war, fifty years before the last war, twenty-five years before the departure of the
First Interstellar. The First and Second Interstellar would be still on the move, he supposed. It had been
understood, obvious, long ago, that after radio contact faded out the world would not hear of them again
for many lifetimes, if ever. They would be on the move, farther and farther away from a planet no longer
capable of understand-ing such matters.
Brian sometimes recalled his place of birth, New Boston, the fine planned city far inland from the old
metropolis which a rising sea had reclaimed after the earthquake of 1994. Such things, places and dates,
were factual props, useful when Brian wanted to im-pose an external order on the vagueness of his
im-mediate existence. He tried to make sure they became no more than that, to shut away the colors, the
poig-nant sounds, the parks and the playgrounds of New Boston, the known faces (many of them loved),
and the later years when he had experienced a curious in-toxication called fame.
It was not necessarily better or wiser to reject these memories, but it was safer, and nowadays Brian
was often sufficiently tired, sufficiently conscious of his growing weakness and lonely unimportance, to
crave safety as a meadow mouse craves a burrow.
He tied his canoe to the massive window which for many years had been a port and a doorway.
Loung-ing there with a suspended sense of time, he hardly knew he was listening. In a way, all the
twenty-five years had been a listening. He watched Earth's pa-tient star sink toward the rim of the forest
on the Pali-sades. At this hour it was sometimes possible, if the sun-crimsoned water lay still, to cease
grieving at the greater stillness.
There must be scattered human life elsewhere, he knew—probably a great deal of it. After
twenty-five years alone, that also often seemed irrelevant. At other times than mild evenings—on hushed
noons or in the mornings always so empty of human commotion—
Brian might lapse into anger, fight the calm by yell-ing, resent the swift dying of his own echoes. Such
moods were brief. A kind of humor remained in him, not to be ruined by any sorrow.
He remembered how, ten months or possibly ten years ago, he had encountered a box turtle in a
forest clearing, and had shouted at it: "They went thata-way!" The turtle's rigidly comic face, fixed in a
cari-cature of startled disapproval, had seemed to point up some truth or other. Brian had hunkered
down on the moss and laughed uproariously until he observed that some of the laughter was weeping.
Today had been rather good. He had killed a deer on the Palisades, and with bow and arrow, not
spend-ing a bullet—irreplaceable toy of civilization.
Not that he needed to practice such economy. He could live, he supposed, another ten years at the
out-side. His rifles were in good condition, his hoarded am-munition would easily outlast him. So would
the stock of canned and dried food stuffed away in his living quarters. But there was satisfaction in
primitive effort, and no compulsion to analyze the why of it.
The stored food was more important than the ammu-nition; a time was coming soon enough when he