"Howard Waldrop - A Better World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

Howard Waldrop

A Better World's in Birth!
Copyright © 2003 by Howard Waldrop
Cover illustration copyright © 2003 by Nicholas Jainschigg


"The Past ain't dead. It ain't even past."
- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun


1
Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation!

THE WHOLE THING BEGAN, I AM TOLD, WITH THE sound of falling books in the Peoples'
Department of Culture.
In my initial inquiry, I pieced together the following:
Comrade Dichter, the chief clerk, was at her desk when she heard the books fall—one, two,
three—inside the office of the Peoples' Minister of Culture. There was the sound of a chair scrap-ing on
the floor and a muted cry.
Comrade Dichter rose from her desk, knocked once, and opened the door to the inner office. The
Minister of Culture was an old man nearing retirement (he had fought on. the barricades of the Revolution
as a man of thirty-five) and had not been in the best of health for a few years, though still a tireless worker.
Dichter feared to see him slumped over his desk or lying on the floor, victim of a stroke or seizure.
She was more surprised to see him standing, backed to the left-ward wall of his office, staring toward
his private bookcase on the right wall, an excited look in his eyes.
His chair was overturned near his desk where he had risen quickly. Several books and the right-hand
bookend, which had held them on the corner of his iron desk, lay on the floor.
He breathed heavily, and put out one hand toward the wall, as if reaching for a curtain or to close a
window.
"Comrade Minister," asked Dichter. "What is?"
He turned his head toward her. His eyes shone with fear, or something more.
"Karl . . ." he said. "Karl Marx was standing there, wearing his last suit and trailing the rope they hanged
him with!"
Only then did the Peoples' Minister of Culture lie down, like a man lowering himself into his usual bed at
home, stretch himself out full-length on the floor of his office, and die with a small sigh.
Since this involved the head of the Department of Culture, and one of the original Revolutionaries, the
Peoples' Department for Security was called in.
In this case, me.

I went back to Department headquarters to make my initial report to my boss.
I boarded Peoples' Traction Company Tram #4 at the corner of Tannhauser Boulevard and Street of the
Peoples, on which all the government departments were located. I looked over my notes of interviews with
six Culture workers, and the doctor who had treated the Peoples' Minister for the last twelve years.
Workers on bicycles, a few pedicabs, and one vehicle based on the eastern rickshaw, pulled by two
sturdy proles in tandem, passed the steam tram. It was true what people said; Dresden was a more
beautiful, quieter, and hygienic city since horses had been banned three years ago, freeing half the street
cleaners for more important jobs. (Rome, 2000 years ago, had taken a halfway measure, forbid-ding the city
to equine traffic between sunup and sundown, which meant only that it was noisier, and you stepped in
road-apples in the darkness.) Here and there one of the new self-propelled vehicles sputtered by, giving off