"Roger Zelazny & Robert Sheckley - A Farce To Be Reckoned With" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

"And walruses?"

"Yes, of course, walruses too! God's instructions were very clear! Two of every kind."

Mrs. Noah gave Noah a look that as good as said, Poor drunken old Noah is having his fantasies again.

The audience loved it. There were about a hundred of them in the improvised theater, lounging on
benches. They howled at Mrs. Noah's lines, stamping their feet to show approval. They were poor
townspeople and rustics mostly, this audience that had gathered to watch a soon-to-be-apocryphal
miracle play called Noah.

Azzie sat in one of the box seats that had been set up on a special scaffolding above and to the right of
the stage. These seats were for the use of the prosperous citizen. From here he could watch the actors
who played Noah's sons' wives changing their costumes. He could lounge at his ease and remain above
the unwashed fetor of the masses for whom these plays, with their morally correct attitudes and their
simpering points of argument, were intended.

The play went on. Noah boarded his boat; the rains began. A yokel with a watering can stood on a
ladder and simulated the beginning of forty days and forty nights of rain. Azzie remarked to the
well-dressed man in the box seat behind him, "Do what God says and everything will come out right for
you! What a trivial conclusion, and how untrue to everyday life, where things come out in the oddest
fashion with no regard for cause and effect."

"A sage point," the man said. "But consider, sir, these tales are not meant to be true to life. They just
point to how a man should attempt to comport himself in various circumstances."

"Well, obviously, sir," Azzie said. "But it is all sheerest propaganda. Don't you ever wish you could see a
play with more invention in it, instead of a concoction like this that links homilies together as a butcher
links sausages? Wouldn't you like to see a play whose plot was not hitched to the simpering determinism
of standard morality?"

"Such would be refreshing, I suppose," the man said. "But such a philosophically based work is unlikely
to come from the clerics who pen this sort of thing. Perhaps you'd care to pursue the point further, sir,
after the play, over a tankard of ale?"

"Delighted," said Azzie. "I am Azzie Elbub, and my profession is gentleman."

"And I am Peter Westfall," the stranger said. "I am a grain importer, and I have my shop near St.
Gregory's in the Field. But I see the players are beginning again."

The play got no better. After it was over, Azzie accompanied Westfall and several of his friends to the
Sign of the Pied Cow, in Holbeck Lane near High Street. The landlord brought them flowing tankards,
and Azzie ordered mutton and potatoes for all.

Westfall had received some education in a monastery in Burgundy. He was a large middle-aged man,
sanguine of complexion, mostly bald, florid of gesture, and tending toward goutiness. From watching him
refuse the meat, Azzie suspected him of vegetarianism, one of the deviant marks by which a Catharist
heretic could be detected. It made no difference to Azzie, but he filed the information away for possible
use some other time. Meanwhile there was the play to discuss with Westfall and the several other