"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)
'You're wasting your time, Sarge,' says the one with the machine gun. 'It's like Steinmetz says -- the kid's a moron. Let's get him back to base. This place gives me the creeps.'
Blindly, Mouse spins and runs to the edge of the man-made opening. The sergeant darts forward to stop him but the boy is too agile. He slides over the edge, clings for a moment, drops into the mound of dust and rock. A sharp fragment of stone slices into his leg as he rolls and gravel skins his hands and knees. On his feet again, he skids down the pile of rubble to the surface, gazes briefly back up at the cursing soldier.
He starts his run across the chamber. The voice of the crewcut man rings after him. 'Come back, you crazy kid. The second time in _kills_ you!'
Again a wave of vertigo strikes him. He staggers. He begins running parallel to the wall, retracing the path he'd followed to the opening.
Alf still lies sprawled at the foot of the steps. Mouse hurls himself at the grid, beating at the invisible barrier with his bleeding fists. It remains as unyielding as metal. He goes back to his uncle, grasps him under the arms and starts tugging him up the steps.
The boy is physically healthy and strong for his age, but he has to proceed in stages, each step a new burst of energy and effort that leaves him gasping. Dizziness comes and goes in waves; streamers of fire are lancing in his head. Alf groans, but remains torpid. The man's back thuds against the steps bruisingly with each heave upwards.
They reach the top. Mouse sits down for a moment, the muscles in his arms trembling, his breath coming in great gulps. Beyond, the Sphere sucks at his eyes. It is huge, solitary, vibrant with some immense leashed power. With an effort he turns away, looks at Alf, places his grazed palms on the man's face. Sick and choking, lips tinged with blue, Alf screams horrendously at the touch without awakening, without opening his eyes. The boy jerks away, keening and rocking.
After a time he stands, hoists the man against him and starts the long aching trek to the tunnel. Streamers of light cascade in his head. He is no longer moving. His body is gone, muffled in darkness, patterns of touch thuttering against his being. His name, he realises, is Helen Keller; vibrations go outward from him, into a sparking void, rebound, return altered. With wondrous, kindly warmth she enfolds him, they fuse. He tumbles in these new places, and she takes his hand as Annie had taken hers, gently, firmly, sweetly. He recalls, dimly, the glorious beam of sunlight shining through the window on her mother's face, he runs on Helen's podgy baby's legs to it, arms outstretched, and it is whipped away in the shrieking pain of her fever, her loss, the closing in of her reality to heartbeat and hunger, the textures that flutter at the skin, rich fragrances and the heavy thuds under her feet, wind ripe and afterwards chill against her face; he falls with her into an oblivion of meaningless fogs. He is the Phantom in a No-World.
And here is the patterning in her cupped hand, repeated, insistently, changing and recurring, the furry small shape and the slithery tiny ones, the inexorable return on her palm's flesh of those dancing touches; he rages with her as the tang of food is withheld, as the hateful cold instruments are pressed into her hand; he softens and weeps for the love he knows in his utter isolation, caressing him.
Then the crash of thunderous understanding, as the spark leaps from palm to brain with the gush of cold water on the wrist, the patterned dance which names it: 'water'. All through her body rings the shock. The repeated motions on her skin, stored without meaning, clash into place, fierce, hard-edged, separate, yet linking in chains of wonderful connection: the names, the names.
Mouse crouches with her by the scent of something small and struggling, reaches for the new tiny shapes, a wiggling slithery form for each of her fingers. The connections coruscate with incredulous joy: mother, the old dog, the baby, five babies -- and the new word jumps upon her cupped hand: 'puppy'. They squirm to the mother, and she feels them sucking at the gorged teats; they are smaller than small. Eagerly, frowning, she seeks the refinement she needs. It comes: 'very small'. The squeal in her throat thrills her as she laughs with pleasure. The puppies are very small!
Mouse stands with Helen in the No-World which has exploded into richness, into expression. Annie is there with them, poor Annie with her sore, weak eyes, dutiful and loving, stern and accepting. The memories that are not his rush like a cascade of cold water in his strange brain, seeding there, taking root where they can. He remembers the discovery of writing, the embossed letters that made up the words, the Braille dots, the exuberant discovery of script. It is too much, his brain cannot cope with this partial interface, this inundation of brilliance, this other life entire. There is more, hammering into echoes, soul upon soul standing behind Helen, connections buzzing into dreadful confusion. The vista explodes outward. Helen has not departed, but he sees the great concourse of general notions shared by this multitude, the inexhaustible well at which they drink. There is a gate through which he has never been able to pass, though he has hammered at it with his fists. It opens and he slips through.
_What is my soul?_
_No one knows what the soul is like_, Annie tells them, her eyes brimming with tears, _but we know it is not the body, and it is that part of us which thinks and loves and hopes, and which Christian people believe will live on after the body is dead. No one can see the soul. It is invisible_.
_But if I write what my soul thinks, then it will be visible, and my words will be its body!_
The sergeant's voice, amplified by a loudhailer, rings out.
'Leave the sick man where he is for the moment, son, and come back to the tunnel. We have a doctor standing by, and we've brought down a trolley so you can wheel him here. The doctor says it's very important to get him on the trolley. Dragging him along the ground makes it more difficult for him to breathe, and that's very bad for him in the condition he's in. Do you understand?'
Mouse straightens up. 'Yes,' he yells back.
He sprints along the base of the wall. The soldiers have lowered a long stretcher on a trolley wheelbase. A worried-looking man in a white coat stands with them; he reminds Mouse of Dr Fish. The boy reaches the mound at the foot of the opening, drags the trolley down the last few centimetres, unties the ropes they've lowered it with.
He waits, then, and searches for the gate. Like the egg Alf cracked into the damaged radiator, floating down in the turbulent, hissing water, coagulating, drifting to the splintered hole, streamers of albumin and whirling yolk hardening, crisping, burning, blocking the damage, something moves into his ruined brain.
'It is Alfred Dean who is injured,' he says clearly. 'He is mother's brother to this one, Hieronymus Dean, or Mouse. His condition resembles emphysema, coupled with an acute psychotic break. He shall be fetched immediately.'
The doctor stares at him. 'You're a brave boy. Your mother's -- your uncle is going to be just fine if we hurry.' He glances away and swallows with difficulty. 'I thought you said he was retarded,' he tells the crewcut sergeant indignantly. He bites his lip and looks fearfully over the edge. 'I want you to listen carefully, son, while I describe the best way to lift him onto the stretcher.'
Everything is blurred, double-images receding to infinity. Shaking with fatigue, Mouse pushes the light trolley back to Alf, squirts medication from a spray-pack into the anthropologist's nostrils, clamps an oxygen mask across his face, wheels him back to the opening. There he ties the man firmly to the stretcher, positioning the broad elastic straps in such a way that they do not further constrict the labouring chest and diaphragm. Carefully, he attaches the ropes to the corners of the trolley. His fingers are clumsy with exhaustion, with fine manipulation of a degree they have never before attained. Several times he fumbles the knots.
'Take it slowly,' the doctor says soothingly. 'He's going to be all right, you've done a wonderful job. You'll both be safe and in the best possible care in a few moments. Just take it nice and easy.'
The sergeant catches him as he slumps, hoists him on brawny shoulders and carries him along the tunnel in the wake of the trolley. A wave of tiredness sweeps over him; the blur of activity, within and without, becomes a whistling greyness. He passes almost instantly into unconsciousness.
--------
*3. The Vault*
At one level there was pain, and the chatter of voices.
For a time it had been excruciating, truly intolerable. Alf knew that he was going to die. Agony so piercing could not be borne. The torment in his lacerated viscera, his compressed skull, his racked, torn limbs smashed everything from his awareness but the single shrieking desire for an end to it. And finally he realised he had not literally been maimed, that his pain was a kind of metaphor for psychic trauma. It eased, diminished, blurred into a generalised bruise spiked with knives: suffocation pressing his face, and the equally terrible and alternating anguish of breathing.
A voice said: 'Cheyne-Stokes respiration. He's terminal, I'm afraid.'
Another voice said angrily: 'You have to pull him out of coma. We _must_ learn how he got into the Vault. The child can't tell us -- he's a hopeless retard.'
'We need electronic equipment -- EEG, EKG, a Birds respirator.'
'You know we can't do that.'
'So for God's sake get them both up to the surface.'
At the first level, the level of pain, Alf Dean also heard his own whimpering gasps for life. Through the anxious and choleric voices, he listened to his own damaged flesh. Faint sighs of breath, and the dull pressure between them. The sighs increasing in volume, shuddering inspirations of air, and the knives, the knives. Silence, and paralysis. Choking, unable to speak, move, force the rusted lock on the cage of his chest. And then, again, the first faint hush of a new cycle...
'I've given him 250 mg aminophylline, intravenously. That'll firm up the periodic respiration, General Sawyer, but he doesn't stand a chance.'
'Major, I don't like to hear that kind of defeatist talk around here.'
'Don't worry, sir, he's in deep coma. He can't hear us.'
'Irrelevant, soldier. _I_ don't want negative thinking. Get the bastard conscious.'
On a second level, Alf Dean spun like a charged particle along the weft and warp of a stupefying matrix of facts he had never learned and relationships between them which he never could have conceived. The military physician who hovered over his labouring, supine body had injected him, Alf knew, with a soluble derivative of theophylline, a bronchodilator of the xanthine diuretic group. The pharmacology of the caffeine-like drug traced itself in his awareness like an illuminated map of the serial moves in a chess game. Despite this vast, dazed access of knowledge, he realised that he had never heard of aminophylline before in his life. That paradox should have filled him with alarm, driven him scrambling up through nightmare to consciousness and light, but the cycle of his harrowed breath beat through its imprisoned rhythm, and his terror was isolated by rapture.
For at a third level, Alf Dean Djanyagirnji was ravished by limitless splendour. Hands and feet gestured, stamped: in ritual he partook of the totem corroboree of Dreaming. Kangaroo bounded, great tail slapping the red dust. Emu ran, a massive matted flightless mop on cruel feet, eyes darting in malicious glee. Goanna scurried, frightened, into shade, emerged again to bask in delightful warmth. Firehawk lofted on streams of cool fast sky, glowing fragments of campfire embers in his beak. Barramundi in the colder stream of bubbling river flashed brilliance from scales, fins, flicking like a dream. The cycle of Alf's trapped breath was here a greater rhythm: life, passage, corruption, hunger, satiety. The stinging chill of rain, and the humid gusts of its rising from the renewed soil.
A dragon named Sri Ramakrishna said to him: I have shared your condition often during my life. The limitless, shining ocean of consciousness, of spirit. Billows rushing from all sides so that I panted for breath and fell senseless, caught up in the folds and banners of sheer light ... The dead Serpent regarded him kindly, holding out its hands. Each hand had two thumbs. Alf recoiled, spun back into the matrix of facts and facts, the drumming of black feet in the earth, the whirl of gorgeous light...
On that pathway, weaving and shuttling amid the bright sparks of reality endlessly arrayed, Alf slipped into hallucination. Or was it memory? Dream? By the white man's reckoning, it was 1942. At piccaninny dawn, the sky paling and the grass cool under his hard soles, in the Turtle Egg Season, he crept with hunter's stealth toward the Strange Thing which the men of that calendar had dropped out of the night. All his wary silence was in vain. Swollen by their child, his wife Wanntukgara crashed behind him with the grace of a maimed wallaby. She had no right to be here. Tracking was man's work. With a brutal gesture, without turning his head, he instructed her to remain where she was. He watched the birds, scanned the ground for the spoor of frightened, fleeing animals. The Strange Thing lay ahead, very close now. A giggle at his shoulder. He turned, scowling. Wanntukgara, her faded green cotton smock torn, printed yellow daisies, dirty, grinned at him, on hands and knees. These women had no respect. Yet he lowered his hand without striking her. Her brown affectionate gaze held no mockery, nothing to diminish him. Still, the racket she made! He smiled back at her. Who was here to observe their presence? The aircraft which had hurled the Strange Thing on to the Mission station had been alone, possibly lost. All the white men's hard, thin beams of light were miles away, to the west, concentrated around Darwin. Each night for a week, he had heard, the beams had slashed the sky like the threads of gigantic spiders caught in moonlight. Sometimes they crossed the path of an intruding aircraft, and hammering broke the night: yellow spears, fading to red, split the stars. The battles of whites were horrible, gross, bereft of dignity or courage. When he had been under the Buka taboo, after circumcision, his grandfather had said to him: 'Puyungarla, the white men are ignorant of balance and honour. They seize our women and the sacred land itself. Do not be like them. They will seduce you with tobacco and alcohol, and threaten you with guns and whips. But you are a man now, Puyungarla. One day you will be the father of men, if that poor little cut thing of yours ever heals and stands up straight. Do not betray your manhood by abandoning your heritage out of greed or fear.'
In hallucinated pseudo-memory, Alf smiled. It had stood up, too right. His fine brown girl, his woman, his wife, Wanntukgara, had crept upon his thighs in the night, as the old women crouched at the edge of the fire to lend her comfort in their nearness and call their shrill advice, and she had slid down wonderfully to envelop his sturdy spear, and the fire of it had rushed into her, into that secret pouch of her body which had been made ready by the Rainbow Serpent, and their seeds had joined, had quickened with the infusing spirit of the new child's Totem...
...and she felt the child beat at her belly even now, as she stepped lightly behind her fine husband. On the horizon the sun trembled, fat and crimson. She followed Puyungarla closely, knowing that it would irritate his pride but wanting to be with him when he found the Strange Thing and made it his own: a sorcerer's thing, egg from a metal bird, magic thing. It would surely give them power and force among the white men.
Alf moaned, an added timbre to the hoarse grunt of his terrible breathing. The transition in dream from male role to female had not bothered him. Something dreadful, though, was about to occur, something he remembered in every cell and organ, something --
'Sorry, did you say something, Major?'
'Um? No.'
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