"Blish, James - Anywhen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

possible-because wholly unknown-exception of the entity Who had spent the
entire voyage in his cabin, with a diplomatic seal spidered over the palm
plate on its door; and Simon suspected that they would have bored him even
had he not had to present himself to them as a disillusioned Sagittarian
mystic, embittered at himself for ever having believed that the Mystery
that lay (or didn't lie) at the galactic centre would someday emerge and
set the rest of the universe to rights, and hence in too unpredictable a
temper to be worth being polite to. Conceivably, indeed probably, some of
the other passengers were trying to be as repellent 13
 A Style in Treason

to strangers as was Simon, but the probability did not make their surfaces
any more diverting.
But of course none of these things-the ship, the delay, the passengers, the
pose-was more than marginally to blame for his weariness. In these days of
treason, politeness, easy travel, and indefinitely prolonged physical
vigour, everyone was tired, just a little but all the time. After a while,
it became difficult to remember who one was supposed to be-and to remember
who one was, was virtually impossible. Even the Baptized, who had had their
minds dipped and then rechannelled with only a century's worth of memories,
betrayed to the experienced eye a vague, tortured puzzlement, as though
still searching in the stilled waters for some salmon of ego they had been
left no reason to suspect had ever been there. Suicide was unconcealedly
common among the Baptized, and Simon did not think the reason (as the
theoreticians and ministers insisted) was really only a minor imperfection
in the process, to be worked out in time.
There was plenty of time; that was the trouble. People lived too damn long,
that was all. Erasing the marks, on the face or in the mind, did not unwind
the years; the arrow of entropy pointed forever in the same direction;
virginity was a fact, not just a state of membrane or memory. Helen,
reawakening in Aithra's Egyptian bed flensed of her history, might bemuse
Menelaus for a while, but there will always be another Paris, and that
without delay-time past is eternally in time present, as Ezra-Tse had said.
The ten-thousand-year-old analogy came easily to him. He was supposed to
be, and in fact was, a native of High Earth; and in his persona as a
Sagittarian (lapsed) would be expected to be a student of such myths, the
more timedimmed the better-hence, in fact, his interminable shipboard
not-quite-game of tarot solitaire. Staying quite automatically in character
was in his nature, as well as being one of his chiefest skills.
And certainly he had never allowed himself to be Bap14
 A Style in Treason

tized, though his mind had been put through not a few lesser changes in the
service of High Earth, and might yet be forced into a greater one if his
mission on Boadacea went awry. Many of his memories were painful, and all of
them were painfully crowded together; but they were his, and that above all
was what,gave them their worth. Some professional traitors were valuable
because they had never had, and never could have, a crisis of identity.
Simon knew without vanity-it was too late for that-that High Earth had no
more distinguished a traitor than he, precisely because he had such crises