"Delany, Samuel R - The Einstein Intersection 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

"Now there's a quaint taste," said Durcet. "Well, Curval, what do you think of that one?"
"Marvelous," the President replied; "there you have an individual who wishes to make himself familiar with the idea of death and hence unafraid of it, and who to that end has found no better means than to associate it with a libertine idea ..."... Supper was served, orgies followed as usual, the household retired to bed.
Le Marquis de Sade/The 120 Days of Sodom

... each bubble contains a complete eye of water.
Samuel Greenburg/The Glass Bubbles

Then to the broken land ("This"-Spider halted his dragon in the shaley afternoon-"is the broken land." He flung a small flint over the edge. It chuckled into the canyon. Around us the dragons were craning curiously at the granite, the veined cliffs, the chasms) slowing our pace now. Clouds dulled the sun. Hot fog flowed around the rocks. I worked one muscle after another against the bone to squeeze out the soreness. Most of the pain (surprise) was gone. We meandered through the fabulous, simple stones.
The dragons made half time here.
Spider said it was perhaps forty kilometers to Branning-at-sea. Wind heated our faces. Glass wound in the rocks. Five dragons began a scuffle on the shale. One was the tumored female. Green-eye and me came at them from opposite sides. Spider was busy at the head of the herd; the scuffle was near the tail. Something had frightened them, and they went plopping up the slope. It didn't occur to us something was wrong; this was the sort of thing that Spider (and Friza) were supposed to be able to prevent (Oh, Friza, I'll find you through the echo of all mourning stones, all praising trees!). We followed.
They dodged through the boulders. I shouted after them. Our whips chattered. We couldn't outrun them. We hoped they would fall to fighting again. We lost them for a minute, then heard their hissing beyond the rocks, lower down.
Clouds smeared the sky; water varnished the trail ahead. As M. M. crossed the wet rock, he slipped.
I was thrown, scraping hip and shoulder. I heard my blade clatter away on the rock. My whip snarled around my neck. For one moment I thought I'd strangle. I rolled down a slope, trying to flail myself to a halt, got scraped up more. Then I dropped over the edge of something. I grabbed out with both hands and feet. Chest and stomach slapped stone. My breath went off somewhere and wouldn't go back into my lungs for a long time. When it did, it came roaring down my sucking throat, whirled in my bruised chest. Busted ribs? Just pain. And roar again with another breath. Tears flooded my sight.
I was holding on to a rock with my left hand, a vine with my right; my left foot clutched a sapling none too securely

by the roots. My right leg dangled. And I just knew it was a long way down.
I rubbed my eye on my shoulder and looked up:
The lip of the trail above me.
Above that, angry sky.
Sound ? Wind through gorse somewhere. No music.
While I was looking it started to rain. Sometimes painful catastrophes happen. Then some little or even pleasant thing follows it, and you cry. Like rain. I cried.
"Lobey."
I looked again.
Kneeling on a shelf of stone a few feet above me to the right was Kid Death.
"Kid ... ?"
"Lobey," he said, shaking wet hair back from his forehead. "I judge you can hold on there twenty-seven minutes before you drop over the edge from exhaustion. So I'm going to wait twenty-six minutes before I do anything about saving your life. O.K.?"
I coughed.
Seeing him close, I guessed he was sixteen or seventeen, or maybe a baby-faced twenty. His skin was wrinkled at his wrists, neck, and under his arms.
Rain kept dribbling in my eyes; my palms stung, and what I was holding on to was getting slippery.
"Ever run into any good westerns?" He shook his head. "Too bad. Nothing I like better than westerns." He rubbed his forefinger under his nose and sniffed. Rain danced on his shoulders as he leaned over to talk to me.
"What is a 'western'?" I asked. My chest still hurt. "And you mean you're really going to make-" I coughed again "-me hang here twenty-six minutes?"

"It's an art-form the Old Race, the humans, had before we came," Kid Death said. "And yes, I am. Torture is an art-form too. I want to rescue you at the last minute. While I'm waiting, I want to show you something." He pointed up to the rim of the road I'd rolled over.
Friza looked down.
I stopped breathing. The pain in my chest exploded, my wide eyes burned with rain. Dark face, slim wet shoulders, then watch her turn her head (gravel sliding under my belly, the whiplash still around my neck and the handle swinging against my thigh) to catch rain in her mouth. She looked back and I saw (or did I hear?) her wonder at life returned, and confusion at the rain, these twisted rocks, these clouds. Glory beat behind those eyes above me. Articulate, she would have called my name; saw me, now, impulsively reached her hand to me (did I hear her fear?). "Friza!"
That was a scream.
You and I know the word I screamed. But nobody else hearing the rough sound my lungs shoved up would have recognized it.
All this, understand, in the instant it takes to open your eyes in the rain, lick a drop from your lip, then focus on what's in front of you and realize it's somebody you love about to die and he tries to scream your name. That's what Friza did there on the road's lip.
And I kept screaming.
What Kid Death did between us was giggle.
Friza began to search right and left for a way to get down to me. She rose, disappeared, was back a moment later, bending a sapling over the edge of the road.
"No, Friza!"

But she started to climb down, dirt and tiny stones shooting out beneath her feet. Then, when she was hanging at the very end, the line of her body arcing dark on the rock, she grabbed the whip handle-neither with hands nor feet, but rather as she had once thrown a pebble, as Spider had once pushed over a chunk of cement, she grabbed the handle from where it hung against my thigh, pulled it, lifted it, straining till rain glistened on her sides, knotted the handle around the sapling above the first fork. She started to climb back, jerk of an arm, away a moment, jerk, away, jerk, reaching handhold by handhold towards the road. It kept on going through my head, here she wakes from how many days' death with only a moment to glory before plunging into the rescue of the life running out below her. She was doing it to save me. She wanted me to grab hold of the whip and haul myself to the tree, then by the tree haul myself to the road. I hurt and loved her, held on and didn't fall.
Kid Death was still chuckling. Then he pointed at the apex of the bent tree. "Break! " he whispered.
It did.
She fell, throwing the branch away from her in one instant; clutching at the stone as she fell, snatched at the length of leather dangling from my neck, then let it go.
She let it go because she knew damn well it would have pulled me from the cliff face.
"Baaa-baaa! " Kid Death said. He was imitating a goat. Then he giggled again.
I slammed my face against the shale. "Friza!" No, you couldn't understand what I howled.