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

and knowing that he would not return to this room, ever.
One of the Directors had been opening a wall cab-inet when he fell; the key lay near his fingers. Their
discussion had not been concerned only with war, per-haps not at all with war. After all, there were other
topics. The Ming vase must have had a part in it. Brian wished he could know what the old man had
meant to take from the cabinet. Sometimes he dreamed of conversations with that man, in which the
Director told him the truth of this and other matters, but what was certainty in sleep was in the morning
gone like childhood.
For himself Brian had taken a little image of rock-hard clay, blackened, two-faced, male and female.
Prehistoric, or at any rate wholly savage, unsophisti-cated, meaningful like the blameless motion of an
animal in sunlight. Brian had said: "With your permission, gentlemen." He had closed the cabinet and then,
softly, the outer door.
"I'm old, too," Brian said to the red evening. He searched for the hawk and could no longer find it in
the deepening sky. "Old, a little foolish—talk aloud to myself. I'll have some Mozart before supper."

He transferred the fresh venison from the canoe to a small raft hitched inside the window. He had
selected only choice pieces, as much as he could cook and eat in the few days before it spoiled, leaving
the rest for the wolves or any other forest scavengers which might need it. There was a rope strung from
the window to the marble steps leading to the next floor of the Mu-seum, which was home.
It had not been possible to save much from the sub-merged area, for its treasure was mostly heavy
statu-ary. Through the still water, as he pulled the raft along the rope, the Moses of Michelangelo gazed
up at him in tranquillity. Other faces watched him; most of them watched infinity. There were white hands
that occasionally borrowed motion from ripples made by the raft. "I got a deer, Moses," said Brian Van
Anda, smiling down in companionship, losing track of time. . . . "Good night, Moses." He carried his juicy
burden up the stairway.
Brian's living quarters had once been a cloakroom for Museum attendants. Four close walls gave it a
feel of security. A ventilating shaft-now served as a chimney for the wood stove Brian had salvaged from
a main-land farmhouse. The door could be tightly locked. There were no windows. You do not want
windows in a cave.
Outside was the Hall of Music, a full acre, an entire floor of the Museum, containing an example of
every musical instrument that was known or could be recon-structed in the twenty-first century. The
library of scores and recordings lacked nothing—except electri-city to make the recordings speak. A few
might still be made to sound on a hand-cranked phonograph, but Brian had not bothered with that toy for
years; the springs were probably rusted.
Brian sometimes took out orchestra and chamber music scores to read at random. Once, reading
them, his mind had been able to furnish ensembles, orches-tras, choirs of a sort, but lately the ability had
weak-ened. He remembered a day, possibly a year ago, when his memory refused to give him the sound
of oboe and clarinet in unison. He had wandered, peevish, dis-tressed unreasonably, alarmed, among the
racks and cases of woodwinds and brasses and violins. He tried to sound a clarinet; the reed was still
good in the dust-proof case, but he had no lip. He had never mastered any instrument except the
pianoforte.
He recalled—it might have been that same day—open-ing a chest of double basses. There was a
three-stringer in the group, old, probably from the early nineteenth century, a trifle fatter than its more
modern compan-ions. Brian touched its middle string in an idle car-ess, not intending to make it sound,
but it had done so. When in: use, it would have been tuned to D; time had slackened the heavy murmur
to A or something near it. That had throbbed in the silent room with finality, a sound such as a
programmatic composer, say Tchaikovsky, might have used as a tonal symbol for the breaking of a
heart. It stayed in the air as other instruments whispered a dim response. "All right, gentlemen," Brian
said, "that was your A. . . ."
Out in the main part of the hall, a place of honor was given to what may have been the oldest of the
instruments, a seven-note marimba of phonolitic schist discovered in Indo-China in the twentieth cen-tury