"Stross, Charles - Ancient Of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Aha, he's awake. Aren't you?"
Eric opened his eyes again. "Very probably," he said, speaking so quietly that it was almost a whisper. "Who is it?" As if I couldn't guess.
"I'm Kris." He sat down at the foot of the bed, stretching the quilt. "If it wasn't for me you'd be dead."
Eric tried to sit up properly. "I suppose I should be grateful, but it would help if I knew what was going on."
Kris nodded understandingly. Eric looked at him and wondered what it was he didn't like about this man. This – weerde, he corrected himself. One of my own kind. But he looks more like a wolf! The thought was distinctly uncomfortable. There was a hot tingling in his arm as the muscles began the slow process of knitting together again.
"What is it you want to know?" asked Kris.
"Well –" Eric struggled, at a loss for words. "What all the fuss is about," he said finally. "I can understand an Ancient becoming interested in the Homoeobox data, but her response seems rather excessive, wouldn't you agree? It's not as if it can achieve anything, after all."
"I don't know," Kris said. "It used to work ... three hundred years ago, against alchemists and would-be magicians."
Eric snorted disbelievingly. "Come on. What does she think this is? The middle ages?"
Kristoph didn't say anything; he didn't need to.
"All right then, be the smart guy! See if I care. Thanks for saving my life, by the way." Kris raised an eyebrow as Eric rolled his feet over the side of the bed and sat up experimentally. "There's more to this than one out-of-control Ancient and a couple of former secret policemen," Eric added as he waited for the dancing black spots to clear from in front of his eyes.
"True," Kris stood up. "Here, let me help you. I think you lost a fair bit of blood."
"Yes, I can't say I'm looking forward to cleaning the sofa –" Eric stopped talking as he stood up, taken aback by his own astonishing irrelevance. He wobbled a bit, but the black spots didn't come back and he was able to shuffle around after a fashion. I must be crazy, he thought, floating. This isn't me here, is it? His arm burned like a torch. "Tell me about everything in particular."
"There's an Organisation," began Kristoph. "It's been around since the twenties, waiting for something like this. It's probably happened before, but each era creates its own orthodoxy, doesn't it? Maybe some such group is where Ancient of Days came from originally. Some bunch of plotters who were afraid that their elders were going to give them away to the Roman secret police."
Eric shuffled over to the chest of drawers and fumbled one-handedly over the chair in front of it. "Dressing gown," he muttered. It seemed a much more concrete concern than any ancient tale of police and thieves. He berated himself. Your future depends on this! But somehow it didn't seem like an immediate problem; more like a light farce, seen through a few too many layers of cotton gauze. I must have lost a fair bit of blood.
"Here. Like I said, we've been waiting. The signs have been around for a long time. Crocodiles seen in the sewers under New York, Yeti sightings in Tibet; the breakdown in human family structures in the developed world –"
"You make this Organisation sound like a bunch of shamen steaming over the entrails of the Sunday Times crossword," Eric winced as he tried to ease his damaged arm into a baggy sleeve. In the end he gave up and wore the robe over it, tucking the cuff of the empty sleeve into the belt. "I mean, are you trying to tell me they deduced from all those signs that some of the Ancients were liable to go loopy within the next few years?"
"Something along those lines," Kris assured him. "There were no overt signs of loss of control – not until recently – but little things were slipping everywhere. All those signs were warnings of a certain ... malaise. Now it's unmistakable. Their responses have become so inappropriate that I'm afraid there's no alternative to action."
"What are you going to do to them?" Eric asked with false levity, pausing in the doorway. I feel drunk, he realised. The truth will set you free! And isn't that better than wine? He glanced over his shoulder at Kristoph, who stood behind him holding an unlit cigarette in one hand.
"What can we do?" Kris replied. There were quiet voices coming from the kitchen. "There's one thing you can be certain of," he said, striking a match. The shadows it cast across his face gave him a calculating, lupine expression: "we're not going to do anything to them that they wouldn't do to us first if we gave them the chance."
Eric felt himself go cold, everywhere except his arm, which was feverishly hot. Suddenly, despite his injury and blood-loss and the intoxicating sense of own survival, he felt entirely sober. An atavistic urge, from god-knew-what recess of his hindbrain, made him want to bare his teeth and snarl. Instead, forcing himself to do the right thing – come on, mister cool! a part of him sneered contemptuously – he went into the living room. It was unlit, but the street lights were bright enough to let h im see that there was a dust-sheet flung over the sofa and a rug on the carpet, and the vase of flowers was gone from on top of the television. He walked over to the windows and looked out across the street, then fumbled with the latch and pushed one of them open. A chill breeze cut through his dressing gown, swirled past him and numbed the stench of blood and gunpowder.
"What do you think?" asked the quiet voice behind him. He didn't turn round.
"I think –" he paused, seeking the words with which to express his anger, his rage at this violation of his carefully-maintained humanity – "there is no precedent for the current situation." He stared down at the streets, watching the traffic scurry and hum along in illuminated columns far below. "We're a conservative people, aren't we?" The word we hung strange and heavy on his tongue. "But the world we live in is undergoing eruptions and upheavals. And when conservative peoples are placed under such a stress they tend to ... well, look at the Russian revolution."
The breeze was beginning to work through to him. He was still weak, and his arm ached; he couldn't summon the resources to keep himself warm. He reached out and pulled the window to until only a slit was left open. "Is this happening everywhere?"
"It is," said Kris. "Maybe you're right, maybe there hasn't been an upheaval like this since the – since the ancient times, the days of legend and darkness. The old race. But someone –" the voice faltered, and in a flash of astonishment Eric realised that he was pleading with him, pleading for his approval, his understanding – "someone has to look to the future! And you are the future, more surely than any conclave of ancients."
Eric turned his back on the window. Kristoph had lit his cigarette, and in the darkness the glowing coal resembled an ancient saurian eye. "But where does that leave you?" asked Eric. "If your organisation takes credit for this killing, where can you go from here? Where are your thoughts for your own future?"
Kris blew a thin plume of smoke from his nostrils. It swirled lazily about his head then drifted towards the door. "I suppose we'll have to be the scapegoats, the nameless ones who will be driven from the present to atone for the sins of the past. Doesn't that sound about right to you? Something's got to go, after all."
"Not if you succeed. But the whole thing sounds so extreme –"
"You're uncomfortable with the idea of killing, aren't you?" said Kris. He began to button up his coat, preparing for the cold of the streets outside. "Listen, I've got to go out now, to arrange for some waste disposal. But there's something you should remember, professor, when you go in to work in your warm office next week and sit in your comfortable chair behind your tidy desk." His face began to slide into another, ancient shape: or else the shadows cast by the city lights were shifting across his che eks. "Remember you're a predator, professor, one of a long line of free-ranging killers. And remember that one's natural instincts can sometimes be very hard to ignore ..."
Presently, Eric struggled to his feet and walked into the kitchen to see what was going on. Sue and Helena were just finishing with the knives and moving onto the bin liners. They both looked up, then Sue had her arms round his neck and was kissing him, tracking bloody stains across the front of his garment. "You're doing well," she whispered in his ear. Louder: "has Kris gone for some boxes then?"
"That's quite likely, I think." Helena rose and peeled off her gloves again, shaking them out carefully. "Ah, I don't think we've been introduced. Have we?"
"Eric, Helena," said Sue. "Helena stayed to help clear up," she added, letting go of him as he glanced around. But Eric wasn't dwelling on the mass that occupied the centre of the floor. "I can see we've got some socialising to do," he said. "It's a long time since either of us have met anyone who wasn't – entirely – human. Still," his expression became unreadable, "do you suppose Kristoph will be long?"
"No, I don't think he will," said Helena. She smiled sharply. "He said he had one more job to do, then it's all over and we can just lie low, 'go to the mattresses' as the mafia call it, until everything dies down." She put the knife and the gloves in the sink and turned the tap on them.
"Then it'll all be over," said Sue, an expression of relief dawning on her face. She turned back to Eric and hugged him, burying her face in his shoulder, all his petty irritations forgotten for the moment. "I'm so glad it's finished."
But she was wrong. In fact, it was only just beginning.

First published: The Weerde, 1991

Version History

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Ver 1.5 - 10/09/2003 - Anarchy Publications, HaVoK - This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.