"Mike Resnick - The Fallen Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi.../spaar/Mike%20Resnick%20-%20The%20Fallen%20Angel.html (1 of 2)23-2-2006 17:46:35
 file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Mike%20Resnick%20-%20The%20Fallen%20Angel.html



And in Hell, where there is no time or date, and where even location is subject to the whim of its Dark
Master, the princes and generals of the pits perched in conclave on a flat outcropping of rock, high
above their sullen ruler.

“Why does he do it?” asked one, the newest member of the elite group. “Surely he could win a chess
game against anyone who ever lived!”

“Just as I could win a coin flip,” agreed the son of Baal, “or step beyond the boundaries of a pentagram
at will.”

“And just as I could have made all women ugly, destroyed Germany, and allowed Skarda life everlasting
while toiling in the pits beneath us,” added Lucifuge Rofocale.

“Then why?” persisted the questioner. “Hell is teeming with the suffering and the damned. Why even
pretend to seek for more? The Dark Master avoids the ones we have now.”

“Of course he does,” said Lucifuge Rofocale. “For he himself is damned beyond the suffering the others
shall ever undergo. They, like you, have never known Paradise.”

“I don't understand.”

“Do you think he enjoys the suffering of the damned?” asked the son of Baal.

“Why not? I do.”

“But you were born a demon, and he an angel.”

The newcomer shook his horned head. “I still don't see what difference that makes.”

“You have all Eternity before you,” said Lucifuge Rofocale. “There will come a time when you
comprehend your master.”

And as they spoke, Lord Lucifer strode through the lava streams of Hell. Finally he stopped and, as he
had done a billion times before and as he would do a trillion times in the future, he raised his gaze to
Heaven. The brilliance of the light seemed to grow in intensity as he stared at it, and an instant later,
tears of pain streaming down his face, the Dark Master let his consciousness float upward and outward,
joining for the merest flickering of an instant the triumphant and pleasure-filled bodies and souls of
Skarda and Achmed and Ellington and a million others, as he grasped futilely for a tiny taste of the
Paradise he had relinquished so long ago.

—The End—

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi.../spaar/Mike%20Resnick%20-%20The%20Fallen%20Angel.html (2 of 2)23-2-2006 17:46:35