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

and thought to be at least 5,000 years of age. The xylophone-type rack was modern. Brian for
twenty-five years had obeyed a compulsion to keep it free of cobwebs. Sometimes he touched the
singing stones, not for amusement but because there was comfort in it. They answered to the light tap of a
fingernail. Be-side them on a little table of its own he had placed the Stone Age god of two faces.
 On the west side of the Hall of Music, a rather long walk from Brian's cave, was a small auditorium.
Lec-tures, recitals, chamber music concerts had been given there in the old days. The pleasant room held
a twelve-foot concert grand, made in 2043, probably the finest of the many pianos in the Hall of Music, a
summit of technical achievement. Brian had done his best to preserve this beautiful artifact, prayer-fully
tuning it three times a year, robbing other pianos in the Museum to provide a reserve supply of strings,
oiled and sealed against rust. When not in use his great piano was covered by stitched-together sheets.
To remove the cover was a somber ritual. Before touch-ing the keys, Brian washed his hands with
needless fanatical care.
Some years ago he had developed the habit of lock-ing the auditorium doors before he played. Yet
even then he preferred not to glance toward the vista of empty seats, not much caring whether this
inhibition derived from a Stone Age fear of finding someone there or from a flat civilized understanding
that no one could be. It never occurred to him to lock the one door he used, when he was absent from
the auditorium. The key remained on the inside; if he went in merely to tune the piano or to inspect the
place, he never turned it.
The habit of locking it when he played might have started (he could not remember) back in the year
2076, when so many bodies had floated down from the north on the ebb tides. Full horror had somehow
been lacking in the sight of all that floating death. Perhaps it was because Brian had earlier had his fill of
horrors, or perhaps in 2076 he already felt so di-vorced from his own kind that what happened to them
was like the photograph of a war in a distant country. Some had bobbed and floated quite near the
Museum. Most of them had the gaping obvious wound: of primitive warfare, but some were oddly
discolored—a new pestilence? So there was (or had been) more trouble up there in what was (or had
been) the shortlived Soviet of North America, a self-styled "nation" that took in east central New York
and most of New England. So . . . Yes, that was probably the year when he had started locking the
doors between his private concerts and an empty world.
He dumped the venison in his cave. He scrubbed his hands, showing high blue veins now, but still
tough, still knowing. Mozart, he thought, and walked, not with much pleasure of anticipation but more
like one externally driven, through the enormous hall that was so full and yet so empty and growing dim
with even-ing, with dust, with age, with loneliness. Music should not be silent.

When the piano was uncovered, Brian delayed. He exercised his hands unnecessarily. He fussed with
the candelabrum on the wall, lighting three candles, then blowing out two for economy. He admitted
presently that he did not want the emotional clarity of Mozart at all, not now. The darkness of 2070 was
too close, closer than he had felt it for a long time. It would never have occurred to Mozart, Brian
thought, that a world could die. Beethoven could have entertained the idea soberly enough, and Chopin
probably; even Brahms. Mozart, Haydn, Bach would surely have dis-missed it as somebody's bad
dream, in poor taste. Andrew Carr, who lived and died in the latter half of the twentieth century, had
endured the idea deep in his bloodstream from the beginning of his childhood.
The date of Hiroshima was 1945; Carr was born in 1951. The wealth of his music was written
be-tween 1969, when he was eighteen, and 1984, when he died among the smells of an Egyptian jail
from in-juries received in a street brawl.
"If not Mozart," said Brian Van Anda to his idle hands, "there is always the Project."
To play Carr's last sonata as it should be played—as Carr was supposed to have said he couldn't
play it himself: Brian had been thinking of that as the Pro-ject for many years. It had begun teasing his
mind long before the war, at the time of his triumphs in a civilized world which had been warmly
appreciative of the polished interpretive artist (once he got the breaks) although no more awake than in
any other age to the creative sort. Back there in the undestroyed society, Brian had proposed to program