"Dozois, Gardner - Disciples" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doroiz Gardner)

"The Messiah. He's come! He's finally come! Today's the day the Messiah comes, after all those thousands of yearsthink of it, Nicky!"
Nicky's eyes narrowed. "What the fuck you talkin' about, man?"
"Don't you ever read the paper, Nicky, or listen to the

radio? The Messiah has come. His name is Murray Kupferberg, He was born in Pittsburgh-"
"Pittsburgh?" Nicky gasped.
"-and He used to be a plumber there. But He is the Messiah. Most of the scholars and the rabbis deny Him, but He really is. The Messiah has really come, at last!"
Nicky gave that snorting bray of laughter, blowing out his rubbery lips, that was one reason-but only one reason-why he was sometimes called Nicky the Horse. "Jesus is the Messiah, man," he said scornfully.
Saul smiled good-naturedly, shrugged, spread his hands. "For you, maybe he is. For you people, the goyim, maybe he is. But we've been waiting for more than five thousand yearsand at last He's come."
"Murray Kupferberg? From Pittsburgh?"
"Murray Kupferberg," Saul repeated firmly, calmly. "From Pittsburgh. He's coming here, today. Jews are gathering here today from all over the country, from all over the world, and today-right here-He's going to gather His people to Him-"
"You stupid fucking kike!" Nicky screamed, his anger breaking free at last. "You're crazy in the head, man. You've been conned. Some fucking con man has taken you for everything, and you're too fucking dumb to see it! All that stuff; man, all that good stuff gone-" He ran out of steam, at a loss for words. All that good stuff gone, and he hadn't gotten any of it. After kissing up to this dipshit for all those years . . . "Oh, you dumb kike," he whispered.
Saul seemed unoffended. "You're wrong, Nicky-but I haven't got time to argue with you. Shalom." He stuck out his hand, but Nicky refused to shake it. Saul shrugged, smiled again, and then walked briskly away, turning the corner onto Sixth Street.
Nicky sullenly watched him go, still shaking with rage. Screwed again! There went his free hotdogs. flying away into the blue on fucking gossamer wings. Carlos was a hard dude,
a streetwise dude-Carlos wasn't going to give him anything, Carlos wouldn't stop to piss on Nicky's head if Nicky's hair was on fire. Nicky stared at the tattered and overlapping posters on the Laundromat wall, and the faces of long-dead politicians stared back at him from among the notices for lost cats and the ads for Czech films and karate classes. Suddenly he was cold, and he shivered.
The rest of the day was a total loss. Nicky's sullen mood threw his judgment and his timing off, and the tourists were thinning out again anyway. The free-form jazz of the Communist coffeehouse band was getting on his nerves-the fucking xylophone player was chopping away as if he were making sukiyaki at Benihana of Tokyo-and the smell of sauerkraut would float over from the hotdog stand every now and then to torment him. And it kept getting colder and colder. Still, some obscure, self-punishing instinct kept him from moving on.
Late in the afternoon, what amounted to a little unofficial parade went by-a few hundred people walking in the street, heading west against the traffic, many of them barefoot in spite of the bitter cold. If they were all Jews on their way to the Big Meeting, as Nicky suspected, then some of them must have been black Jews, East Indian Jews, even Chinese Jews.
Smaller groups of people straggled by for the next hour or so, all headed uptown. The traffic seemed to have stopped completely, even the cross-town buses; this rally must be big, for the city to've done that.
The last of the pilgrims to go by was a stout, fiftyish Society Hill matron with bleached blue hair, walking calmly in the very center of the street. She was wearing an expensive ermine stole, although she was barefoot and her feet were bleeding. As she passed Nicky, she suddenly laughed, unwrapped the stole from around her neck, and threw it into the air, walking on without looking back. The stole landed across the shoulders of the Communist xylophone player, who goggled blankly for a moment, then stared wildly around himhis eyes widening comically-and then bolted, clutching the stole tightly in his hands; he disappeared down an alleyway.

"You bitch!" Nicky screamed. "Why not me? Why didn't you give it to me?"
But she was gone, the street was empty, and the gray afternoon sky was darkening toward evening.
"The Last Days are coming," Nicky told the last few strolling tourists and window shoppers. "The strait gate is narrow, sayeth the Lord, and few will fit in, man." But his heart wasn't in it anymore. Nicky waited, freezing, his breath puffing out in steaming clouds, stamping his feet to restore circulation, slapping his arms, doing a kind of shuffling jig that along with his too-small jacket-made him look more than ever like an organ grinder's monkty performing for some unlikely kind of alms. He didn't understand why he didn't just give up and go back to the Lordhouse. He was beginning to think yearningly of the hot stew they would be served there after they had turned the day's take in to Father Delardi, the hymn-singing later, and after that the bottle of strong raw wine, his mattress in the rustling, fart-smelling communal darkness, oblivion . . . .
There was . . . a sound, a note, a chord, an upswelling of something that the mind interpreted as music, as blaring iron trumpets, only because it had no other referents by which to understand it. The noise, the music, the something-it swelled until it shook the empty street, the buildings, the world, shook the bones in the flesh and the very marrow in the bones, until it filled every inch of the universe like hot wax being poured into a mold.
Nicky looked up.
As he watched, a crack appeared in the dull gray sky. The sky split open, and behind the sky was nothingness, a wedge of darkness so terrible and absolute that it hurt the eyes to look at it. The crack widened, the wedge of darkness grew. Light began to pour through the crack in the sky, blinding white light more intense and frightening than the darkness had been. Squinting against that terrible radiance, his eyes watering, Nicky saw tiny figures rising into the air far away, thousands upon thousands of human figures floating up into
the sky, falling up while the iron music shook the firmament around them, people falling up and into and through the crack in the sky, merging into that wondrous and awful river of light, fading, disappearing, until the last one was gone.
The crack in the sky closed. The music grumbled and rumbled away into silence.
Everything was still.
Snowflakes began to squeeze like slow tears from the slate-gray sky.
Nicky stayed there for hours, staring upward until his neck was aching and the last of the light was gone, but after that nothing else happened at all.