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

A woman's happiness lies not in liberty, but in the acceptance of a duty.
And what was that duty? Fran wondered. What could it be but love? i n a v i s i o n
once I saw
There were no mirrors in Xanadu, and yet every vista seemed to be framed as by those tinted looking
glasses of the eighteenth century that turned everything into a Claude Lorrain. Look too long or too
closely into someone else's face, and it became your own. Chantal would tilt her head back, a flower
bending to the breeze, and she would morph into Fran's friend of his earlier afterlife, Debora. Debora,
whose hand had caressed his vanished sex, whose wit had entertained him with Cartesian doubts.

They were the captives (it was explained, when Fran summoned Help) of pirates, and must yield to the
desires of their captors in all things. That they were in the thrall of copyright pirates, not authentic
old-fashioned buccaneers, was an epistomological quibble. Subjectively their captors could exercise the
same cruel authority as any Captain Kidd or Hannibal Lecter. Toes and nipples don't know the difference
between a knife and an algorithm. Pirates of whatever sort are in charge of pain and its delivery, and that
reduces all history, all consciousness, to a simple system of pluses and minuses, do's and don'ts. Suck my
dick or walk the plank. That (the terrible simplicity) was the downside of living in a pleasure-dome.
"Though, if you think about it," said Debora, with her hand resting atop the strings of her dulcimer, as
though it might otherwise interrupt what she had to say, "every polity is ultimately based upon some
calculus of pleasure, of apportioning rapture and meting out pain. The jukebox and the slot machine, what
are they but emblems of the Pavlovian bargain we all must make with that great dealer high in the sky?"
She lifted a little silver hammer and bonked her dulcimer a triple bonk of do-sol-do.
"The uncanny thing is how easily we can be programmed to regard mere symbolsтАФ" Another
do-sol-do. "тАФas rewards. A bell is rung somewhere, and something within us resonates. And music
 becomes one of the necessities of life. Even such a life as this, an ersatz afterlife."
"Is there some way to escape?" Fran asked.
Debora gave an almost imperceptible shrug, which her dulcimer responded to as though she were a
breeze and it a wind chime hanging from the kitchen ceiling. "There are rumors of escapeesтАФE-Men, as
they're called. But no one I've ever known has escaped, or at least they've never spoken of it. Perhaps
they do, and get caught, and then the memory of having done so is blotted out. Our memories are not
exactly ours to command, are they?"
The dulcimer hyperventilated.
Debora silenced it with a glance and continued: "Some days I'll flash on some long-ago golden oldie, and
a whole bygone existence will come flooding back. A whole one-pound box of madeleines, and I will be
absolutely convinced by it that I did have a life once upon a time, where there were coffee breaks with
doughnuts bought at actual bakeries and rain that made the pavements speckled and a whole immense
sensorium, always in flux, which I can remember now only in involuntary blips of recall. And maybe it
really was like that once, how can we know, but whether we could get back to it, that I somehow can't
believe."
"I've tried to think what it would be like to be back there, where we got started." Fran gazed into the
misty distance, as though her earlier life might be seen there, as in an old home video. "But it's like trying to
imagine what it would be like in the thirteenth century, when people all believed in miracles and stuff. It's
beyond me."
"Don't you believe in miracles, then?" The dulcimer twanged a twang of simple faith. "I do. I just don't
suppose they're for us. Miracles are for people who pay full price. For us there's just Basic Tier
programmingтАФ eternal time and infinite space."
"And those may be no more than special effects."
Debora nodded. "But even so ..." "Even so?" Fran prompted.
"Even so," said Debora, with the saddest of smiles, a virtual flag of surrender, "if I were you, I would try to
escape."