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

back of your hand, seeing through your own flesh as it passes before your
eyes. You feel laughter at the back of your throat, and it bubbles out of
you—too loud, too hearty, a maniac's howl. You raise your foglike fist and
brandish it at the heavens. Lightning bolts crackle. You shake your fist
harder and inhale the storm wind like the breath of a lover.
You look up the slope of Calvary as the final stroke of the mallet is
driven home and you feel the wooden handle and the iron spike in your
own hands. The cross is erected, and it is you who hangs from it, and the
sky is dissolved in a deafening blast of light brighter than a thousand suns.
And you are trudging on an endless plain of blowing gray ash under a sky
the color of rusting steel. The jagged ruins of broken buildings protrude
from the swirling dust, and the world is full of maimed and skeletal people
marching from horizon to horizon without hope. But your body has the
plodding leaden strength of a thing that knows it cannot die. Pain in your
wrists, and ashes in your mouth. The people around you begin to rot on
their feet, to melt like Dali watches, and then only you remain, custodian
of a planetary corpse. A ghostly sailing ship approaches you, luffing and
pitching on the storm-whipped ash.
The quarterdeck pitches under your feet and the skies howl. Then the
storm clouds around the moon melt away to reveal a cool utter blackness
punctuated by myriad hard points of light, and the quarterdeck becomes a
steel bulkhead under your feet and you are standing in an observation
bubble of a primitive first-generation torchship. Around your starry
horizon are dozens of other converted asteroid freighters, little more than
fusion torchtubes with makeshift domes, blisters, and toroid decks
cobbled to their surfaces—the distant solar ancestors of the Trek.
You turn to see an ancient horror standing beside you: an old, old man,
his face scarred by radiation, his soul scarred by bottomless guilt, and his
black eyes burning coldly with eternal ice.
You are standing in an observation bubble of a first-generation
torch-ship. Below, the Earth is a brownish, singed, cancerous ball still
stewing in the radiation of the Slow Motion War. Somewhere a bell is
tolling, and you can feel the tug of the bellrope in your hands. Turning, you
see a lean, sinister man with a face all flat planes and eyes like blue coals.
His face fades into fog for a moment, and only those mad eyes remain
solid and real.
"Hello, Dutchman," you say.
"Hello, Refugee."
"I'm usually called Wanderer."
"That's no longer much of a distinction," the Dutchman says. "All men
are wanderers now."
"We're all refugees too. We've killed the living world that gave us birth.
Even you and I may never live to see another." The bite of the nails into
your wrists, the weight of the mallet in your hand. Thirst, and the tolling
of a far-off bell.
You are the Dutchman, looking out into the universal night; a
generation to the nearest star, a century to the nearest hope of a living
world, forever to the other side. Thunder rolls inside your head and
lightnings flash behind your eyes. "We've got these decks under our feet,
the interstellar wind to ride, and fusion torches to ride it with," you say.