"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

A SPECIAL KIND OF
MORNING
Gardner Dozois

The Doomsday Machine is the human race.
тАФQRAFFITO IN NEW YORK SUBWAY,
SEVENTY-NINTH STREET STATION

Did y'ever hear the one about the old man and the sea?

Halt a minute, lordling; stop and listen. It's a fine story, full of balance
and point and social pith; short and direct. It's not mine. Mine are long
and rambling and parenthetical and they corrode the moral fiber right out
of a man. Come to think, I won't tell you that one after all. A man of my
age has a right to prefer his own material, and let the critics be damned.
I've a prejudice now for webs of my own weaving.

Sit down, sit down: butt against pavement, yes; it's been done before.
Everything has, near about. Now that's not an expression of your black
pessimism, or your futility, or what have you. Pessimism's just the
commonsense knowledge that there's more ways for something to go
wrong than for it to go right, from our point of view anywayтАФwhich is not
necessarily that of the management, or of the mechanism, if you prefer
your cosmos depersonalized. As for futility, everybody dies the true death
eventually; even though executives may dodge it for a few hundred years,
the hole gets them all in the end, and I imagine that's futility enough for a
start. The philosophical man accepts both as constants and then doesn't
let them bother him any. Sit down, damn it; don't pretend you've
important business to be about. Young devil, you are in the enviable
position of having absolutely nothing to do because it's going to take you a
while to recover from what you've just done.

There. That's better. Comfortable? You don't look it; you look like
you've just sat in a puddle of piss and're wondering what the socially
appropriate reaction is. Hypocrisy's an art, boy; you'll improve with age.
Now you're bemused, lordling, that you let an old soak chivy you around,
and now he's making fun of you. Well, the expression on your face is worth
a chuckle; if you could see it you'd laugh yourself. You will see it years
from now too, on some other young man's faceтАФthat's the only kind of
mirror that ever shows it clear. And you'll be an old soak by that time, and
you'll laugh and insult the young buck's dignity, but you'll be laughing
more at the reflection of the man you used to be than at that particular
stud himself. And you'll probably have to tell the buck just what I've told
you to cool him down, and there's a laugh in that too; listen for the echo of
a million and one laughs behind you. I hear a million now.

How do I get away with such insolence? What've I got to lose, for one
thing. That gives you a certain perspective. And I'm socially instructive in
spite of myselfтАФI'm valuable as an object lesson. For that matter, why is
an arrogant young aristo like you sitting there and putting up with my