"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)ruled? From Norse mythology it had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huergelmir. The
wind creature. Hurakan incarnate. Gigantic. The words immense, monstrous, grotesque, massive, swollen, overpowering, beyond description. There on a mound rising above us, the bird of winds heaved with its own irregular breathing, its snake neck arching up into the gloom beneath the North Pole, supporting a head as large as a Tudor mansion; a beak that opened slowly as the jaws of the most monstrous crocodile ever conceived, sensuously; ridges of tufted flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly; it heaved once more, and lifted its great sweat-colored wings in a movement that was certainly a shrug. Then it settled and slept. Talons. Fangs. Nails. Blades. It slept. AM appeared to us as a burning bush and said we could kill the hurricane bird if we wanted to eat. We had not eaten in a very long time, but even so, Gorrister merely shrugged. Benny began to shiver and he drooled. Ellen held him. тАЬTed, IтАЩm hungry,тАЭ she said. I smiled at her; I was trying to be reassuring. But it was as phony as NimdokтАЩs bravado: тАЬGive us weapons!тАЭ he demanded. The burning bush vanished and there were two crude sets of bow and arrows, and a water pistol, lying on the cold deckplates. I picked up a set. Useless. Nimdok swallowed heavily. We turned and started the long way back. The hurricane bird had blown us about for a length of time we could not conceive. Most of that time we had been unconscious. But we had not eaten. A month on the march to the bird itself. Without food. Now how much longer to find our way to the ice caverns, and the promised canned goods? None of us cared to think about it. We would not die. We would be given filths and scums to eat, of one kind or another. Or nothing at all. AM would keep our bodies alive somehow, in pain, in agony. The bird slept back there, for how long it didnтАЩt matter; when AM was tired of its being there, it would vanish. But all that meat. All that tender meat. As we walked, the lunatic laugh of a fat woman rang high and around us in the computer It was not EllenтАЩs laugh. She was not fat, and I had not heard her laugh for one hundred and nine years. In fact, I had not heard...we walked...I was hungry... We moved slowly. There was often fainting, and we would have to wait. One day he decided to cause an earthquake, at the same time rooting us to the spot with nails through the soft pads of our feet. Ellen and Nimdok were both caught when a fissure shot its lightning-bolt opening across the floorplates. They disappeared and were gone. When the earthquake was over we continued on our way, Benny, Gorrister, and myself. Ellen and Nimdok were returned to us later that night which became a day abruptly as the heavenly legion bore them to us with a celestial chorus singing, тАЬGo Down Moses.тАЭ The archangels circled several times and then dropped the hideously mangled bodies. We kept walking, and a while later Ellen and Nimdok fell in behind us. They were no worse for wear. But now Ellen walked with a limp. AM had left her that. It was a long trip to the ice caverns, to find the canned food. Ellen kept talking about Bing cherries and Hawaiian fruit cocktail. I tried not to think about it. The hunger was something that had come to life, even as AM had come to life. It was alive in my belly, even as we were alive in the belly of AM, and AM was alive in the belly of the Earth, and AM wanted the similarity known to us. So he heightened the hunger. There was no way to describe the pains that not having eaten for months brought us. And yet we were kept alive. Stomachs that were merely cauldrons of acid, bubbling, foaming, always shooting spears of sliver-thin pain into our chests. It was the pain of the terminal ulcer, terminal cancer, terminal paresis. It was unending pain... And we passed through the cavern of rats. |
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