"Eric Brown - The Phoenix Experiment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

The Phoenix Experiment
a short story by Eric Brown

Foreword

"The Phoenix Experiment" is a companion piece to my short story The
Disciples of Apollo. It follows some of the same themes and concerns of
that story, loneliness and redemption, though in an overtly
science-fictional setting. It is a mood piece, the description of the time
in the life of a recognisably human character, perhaps one hundred years
hence.
It was published in the small press magazine The Lyre #1, in the summer of
'91.

The Phoenix Experiment

One month after the death of his daughter, Jonathon Fuller decided to
leave the city. The life and energy of the place was too stark a contrast
to the isolation he had imposed upon himself, too harsh a reminder of his
daughter's passing. He needed the tranquillity of the countryside, where
his desire to be alone would not be seen as perverse, to come to terms
with his guilt and eventually, perhaps, to persuade himself to return. He
shelved all his projects and told his agent that he was going away for a
long holiday.
Early that Summer he drove from the city and toured the southern coastline
in search of a suitable retreat, somewhere isolated and idyllic, untouched
by the technologies of contemporary life. Within a week he discovered a
lonely village overlooking the Channel, and made enquiries at a local
property office. He was told that there were no houses for rent in the
village itself - but there were chalets available in the Canterbury
Rehabilitation Community, half a mile away.
He'd heard about the Community, but, far from being deterred by the nature
of the place, it occurred to him that there he might be allowed the
privacy he desired. When he arrived at the enclosed estate later that
afternoon he was met by an invalid in a carriage, who called himself the
Captain and showed Fuller to one of a dozen identical A-frames that
occupied a greensward overlooking the ocean. The view of the seascape, and
the chalet's relative isolation, cheered him. He thought back to his
depressive state in the city and told himself that this was exactly what
he had been seeking.
That first night, as darkness fell and the stars appeared, he took a
bottle of scotch onto the balcony, drank and stared at the constellations.
The Captain had told him that he would be made welcome by the rest of the
patients - at this stage of their rehabilitation, he had said, they rarely
had contact with outsiders. Fuller had been unable to bring himself to
tell the Captain that he would not be requiring company for some time.
In one of the other A-frames on the gently sloping greensward, a party was
in progress: the patients, he thought, doing their best to forget the
present. Dark shapes passed across the lighted squares of windows like
figures in an Indonesian shadow play, and laughter drifted to him on the