"Jack Dann - The Diamond Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

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*Four*
It seemed like a dream, but, of course, it wasn't. I hadn't drunk very
much, only a highball with Farley James and Keith Boardman in the library
where we'd played a few games of mah-jongg after dinner. That might not sound
like a very manly thing to do, but then none of that mattered in the pit. I'd
become a veteran.
We shouted "Pung!" and "Chow!" and "Kong!" and swore blue murder as we
rolled the dice and tried to build winning hands out of the inlaid ivory
tiles. After about an hour, I started feeling queasy and headachy and
cotton-mouthed, and so did Farley and Keith. We figured it was the food and
blamed Snap Geraldson, who must have requested shit-on-a-shingle again -- aka
tuna on toast -- and the dumbwaiter in the dining room obliged.
So we dispersed and went to our rooms.
I fell asleep immediately, fell into the deep sleep of exhaustion, as
though I was back in the war, flying mission after mission; and I dreamed that
I was looking up at my ceiling, which glowed dimly like faraway neon; and it
was like being a kid again and seeing faces and animals and buildings in the
stucco ceiling of my bedroom. Only now part of the ceiling was slowly floating
down toward me, and two slaves dressed in white uniforms were standing on what
might have been a scaffold platform. They were black angels, and they carried
me up to heaven. I smelled sweat and ambergris and roses and
I dreamed that I would float upward forever --
****
As I woke up, blinking in the strong morning light, I could see ebony
panels on tracks sliding open to reveal formal gardens with stone hermae,
geysering fountains, lamps, a marble wellhead, terra-cotta jars tall as a man,
and statues of sylphs and mythical animals so lifelike that they almost seemed
to move through the boughs and terraced pathways. My new chamber was now open
to the world, and I could smell perfume and the richness of loamy soil. Beyond
the gardens lay a small village of cottages massed around a church; but it was
no ordinary church; it rose into the brittle blue sky like it was all of a
steeple; and it was transparent as glass, proof that man could rise up and
tear into the very fabric of Heaven.
"The gardens are indeed beautiful this morning, are they not, sir,"
said a man dressed in the same uniform as the men in my dream. He looked to be
in his seventies, but he carried himself like an officer who was used to
giving orders. His strong face and bald pate seemed polished; the wrinkles
that radiated from his eyes and the corners of his thin mouth resembled fine
scrolling chiseled into mahogany.
"Yeath," I said, my mouth dry and swollen and tasting of iron. My
tongue didn't seem to be working right; it filled my entire mouth and wouldn't
get out of the way of my teeth.
I'd surely been drugged.
"Whey am I an' ha'ad I get hea?"
The old man smiled, as one would at a child, and said, "You're in the
north bedroom of the guest suite. You're a guest of the master, and it's my
privilege to serve you, Mr. Orsatti." I couldn't place his accent. It seemed
Southern, but it had a certain crispness, a _wrongness_, as if an Englishman
or German were speaking with a drawl.