"Thomas M. Disch - In Xanadu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

In the late sixties, Tom Disch, along with John Sladek, was, in a I sense, the U.S. Ambassador to
the British New Wave movement. His novel Camp Concentration, written in that period, should be
on every reading list of classic sf.
Over the years Disch has been, besides a great novelist in and out of sf, a poet, playwright,
critic, children's author (his Brave Little Toaster was even Disney-ized), teacher, and, of course,
short-story writer.
I've considered him a mentor for more than twenty-five years and am proud to present his
latest fiction, which recalls a bit his New Wave days.
In Xanadu


thomas M. disch




In memory of John Sladek, who died March 10, 2000

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
тАФSamuel Taylor Coleridge




PART ONE

xanadu

H
is awareness was quite limited during the first so-long.Apopup screen saidWELCOMETOXANADU,[Cook, Fran].YOUR A T R I EB GN N WB O G T
F E LF E I S O ! R U H
T Y UB DS E - I S BS IP ODUCTIONSof quebec!a votre sante toujours! Then there wasa choice of buttons to click on, Okay or Cancel. H didn't
O O Y I N YMT U I H R e
havean actual physical mouse, but there wasan equivalent in his mind, in much the way that amputees have ghostly limbs, but when he clicked on Okay with
his mental mouse there wasa dull Dong! and nothing happened. When he clicked on Cancel there was a trembling and the smallest flicker of
darkness and then the pop-up screen greeted him with the original message.
This went on for an unknowable amount of time, there being no means by which elapsed time could be measured. After he'd Dong!ed on Okay enough
times, he stopped bothering. The part of him that would have been motivated, back when, to express impatience or to feel resentment or to worry just wasn't
connected.He felt an almost supernatural
passivity. Maybe this is what people were after when they took up meditation. Or maybe it was
supernatural, though it seemed more likely, from the few clues he'd been given, that it was cybernetic
in some way. He had become lodged (he theorized) in a faulty software program, like a monad in a
game of JezzBall banging around inside its little square cage, ricocheting off the same four points on
the same four walls forever. Or as they say in Quebec, toujours.
And oddly enough that was Okay. If he were just a molecule bouncing about, a lifer rattling his
bars, there was a kind of comfort in doing so, each bounce a proof of the mass and motion of the
molecule, each rattle an SOS dispatched to someone who might think, Ah-ha, there's someone there!