"Norman Spinrad - Riding the Torch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

propaganda, I must admit."
Once again, Bandoora seemed strangely stricken, as if D'mahl's words
had probed some inner wound.
"The planet, Jof, the planet!"
Fighting to control a building wave of anger, D'mahl managed an arch
smile. "I was paying more attention to Sidi," he said. "Voidsuckers come
up with planets that look that good from a distance much more often than
you see bodies that look that good that close."
"You think the future of the human race is a rather humorous subject,"
Bandoora said loudly, betraying annoyance for the first time.
D'mahl tapped the time at 23.981. His guests were all blatting about the
prospects of at last finding a viable mudball, and Wandering Dutchmen
was about to begin! Leaping to his feet, he shouted: "Bandoora, you've
been out in the big zilch too long!" The sheer volume of his voice focused
the attention of every guest on his person. "If I were confined in a
scoutship with Sidi, I'd have something better than slok planets on my
mind!"
"You're a degenerate and an egomaniac, D'mahl!" Bandoora blatted
piously, drawing the laughter D'mahl had hoped for.
"Guilty on both counts," D'mahl said. "Sure I'm an egomaniac—like
everyone else, I'm the only god there is. Of course I'm a degenerate, and so
is everyone else—soft protoplasmic machines that begin to degenerate
from day one!"
All at once D'mahl had penetrated the serious mood that the bulletin
had imposed on his party, and by donning it and taking it one step
beyond, had recaptured the core. "We're stuck where we are and with
what we are. We're Flying Dutchmen on an endless sea of space, we're
Wandering Jews remembering what we killed for all eternity—"
A great groan went up, undertoned with laughter at the crude bridge to
the impending premiere, overtoned with sullenness at the reminder of just
who and what they were. D'mahl had blown it—or at least failed to entirely
recover—and he knew it, and the knowledge was a red nova inside his
skull. At this moment of foul karma, 2,4.000 passed into realtime, and on
tap frequency E-6—



You are standing at the base of a gentle verdant hill on whose
tree-dotted summit a man in a loincloth is being nailed to a cross. Each
time the mallet descends, you feel piercing pains in your wrists. You stand
in an alleyway in ancient Jerusalem holding a jug of water to your breast
as Jesus is dragged to his doom, and you feel his terrible hopeless thirst
parching your throat. You are back at Calvary listening to the beat of the
mallet, feeling the lightnings of pain in your wrists, the taste of burning
sands in your mouth.
You are on the quarterdeck of an ancient wooden sailing ship tasting
the salt wind of an ocean storm. The sky roils and howls under an evil
green moon. Your crew scurries about the deck and rigging, shouting and
moaning in thin spectral voices, creatures of tattered rags and ghostly
transparent flesh. Foam flies into your face, and you wipe it off with the