"Aldiss, Brian - There is a Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

THERE IS A TIDE
by Brian W. Aldiss

How SOOTHING to the heart it was to be home. I began that
evening with nothing but peace in me: and the evening itself
jellied down over Africa with a mild mother's touch: so that
even now I must refuse myself the luxury of claiming any pre-
monition of the disaster for which the scene was already set.
My half-brother, K-Jubal (we had the same father), was
in a talkative mood. As we sat at the table on the veranda
of his house, his was the major part of the conversation: and
this was unusual, for I am a poet, and poets are generally
articulate enough.
"... because the new dam is now complete," he was say-
ing, "and I shall take my days more easily. I am going to
write my life story, Rog. G-Williams on the World Weekly
has been pressing me for it for some time; it'll be serialized,
and then turned into audibook form. I should make a lot of
money, eh?"
He smiled as he asked this; in my company he always
enjoyed playing the heavy materialist. Generally I encouraged
him; this time I said: "Jubal, no man in Congo States, no
man in the world possibly, has done more for people than
you. I am the idle singer of an idle day, but youwhy, your
good works lie about you."
I swept my hand out over the still bright land.
Mokulgu is a rising town on the western fringes of Lake
Tanganyika's nothem end. Before Jubal and his engineers
came here, it was a sleepy market town, and its natives lived
in the indolent fashion of their countless forefathers. In ten
years, that ancient pattern was awry; in fifteen, shattered
completely. If you lived in Mokulgu now, you slept in a bed
in a towering nest of flats, you ate food unfouled by flies,
and you moved to the sound of whistles and machinery. You
had at your black fingertips, in fact, the benefits of what
we persist in calling "Western civilization". If you were more
hygienic and healthyso ran the theoryyou were happier.
But I begin to sound sceptical. That is my error. I happen
to have little love for my fellow men; the thought of the
Massacre is always with me, even after all this time. I could
not deny that the trend of things at Mokulgu and elsewhere,
the constant urbanization, was almost unavoidable. But as
a man of sensibility, I regretted that human advance should
always be over the corpse of Nature.
From where we sat over our southern wines, both lake
and town were partially visible, the forests in the immediate
area having been demolished long ago. The town was already
blazing with light, the lake looked already dark, a thing
preparing for night. And to our left, standing out with a