"Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

The Fifth Head of Cerberus
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
"A Story" by John V. Marsch
V. R. T.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus
When the ivy-tod is heavy with snow,
And the owlet whoops to the wolf below,
That eats the she-wolf's young.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge--
"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"
When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were
sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because
our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the
central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in
for hours while we lay staring out at my father's crippled monkey perched on a
flaking parapet, or telling stories, one led to another, with soundless gestures.
Our dormitory was on the uppermost floor of the house, and our window had a
shutter of twisted iron which we were forbidden to open. I suppose the theory was
that a burglar might, on some rainy morning (this being the only time he could hope
to find the roof, which was fitted out as a sort of pleasure garden, deserted) let down a
rope and so enter our room unless the shutter was closed.
The object of this hypothetical and very courageous thief would not, of course, be
merely to steal us. Children, whether boys or girls, were extraordinarily cheap-in
Port-Mimizon; and indeed I was once told that my father who had formerly traded in
them no longer did so because of the poor market. Whether or not this was true,
everyone--or nearly everyone--knew of some professional who would furnish what
was wanted, within reason, at a low price. These men made the children of the poor
and the careless their study, and should you want, say, a brown-skinned, red-haired
little girl or one who was plump or who lisped, a blond boy like David or a pale,
brown-haired, brown-eyed boy such as I, they could provide one in a few hours.
Neither, in all probability, would the imaginary burglar seek to hold us for
ransom, though my father was thought in some quarters to be immensely rich. There
were several reasons for this. Those few people who knew that my brother and I
existed knew also, or at least had been led to believe, that my father cared nothing at
all for us. Whether this was true or not, I cannot say; certainly I believed it, and my
father never gave me the least reason to doubt it, though at the time the thought of
killing him had never occurred to me.
And if these reasons were not sufficiently convincing, anyone with an
understanding of the stratum in which he had become perhaps the most permanent
feature would realize that for him, who was already forced to give large bribes to the
secret police, to once disgorge money in that way would leave him open to a thousand
ruinous attacks; and this may have been--this and the fear in which he was held--the
real reason we were never stolen.
The iron shutter is (for I am writing now in my old dormitory room) hammered to
resemble in a stiff and oversymmetrical way the boughs of a willow. In my boyhood
it was overgrown by a silver trumpet vine (since dug up) which had scrambled up the
wall from the court below, and I used to wish that it would close the window entirely
and thus shut out the sun when we were trying to sleep; but David, whose bed was
under the window, was forever reaching up to snap off branches so that he could
whistle through the hollow stem, making a sort of panpipe of four or five. The piping,