"Harlan Ellison - Troublemakers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

was our chance.

My unicorn came to me, then, and brushed his muzzle against my shoulder. I reached up and scratched
around the base of his spiral horn, his favorite place. He gave a long, silvery sigh, and in that sound I
heard the sentence I was serving on him, as well as myself. We had been linked, too. Assigned to one
another by the One who had ordained this nightтАЩs chance. But if I lost out, so did my unicorn; he who
had wandered with me through all the soundless, lightless years.

I stood up. I was by no means ready to do battle, but at least I could stay in for the full ride . . . all the
way on the downhill side. тАЬDo you know where they are?тАЭ
My unicorn started off down the street.

I followed, hopelessness warring with frustration. Dusk to dawn is the full ride, the final chance. After
midnight is the downhill side. Time was short, and when time ran out there would be nothing for Lizette or
me or my unicornbut time. Forever.

When we passed the Royal Orleans Hotel I knew where we were going. The sound of the Quarter had
already faded. It was getting on toward dawn. The human lice had finally crawled into their flesh-mounds
to sleep off the night of revelry. Though I had never experienced directly the New Orleans in which
Lizette had grown up, I longed for the power to blot out the cancerous blight that Bourbon Street and the
Quarter had become, with its tourist filth and screaming neon, to restore it to the colorful yet healthy state
in which it had thrived a hundred years before. But I was only a ghost, not one of the gods with such
powers, and at that moment I was almost at the end of the line held by one of those gods.

My unicorn turned down dark streets, heading always in the same general direction, and when I saw the
first black shapes of the tombstones against the night sky, thelightening night sky, I knew IтАЩd been
correct in my assumption of destination.

The Saint Louis Cemetery.

Oh, how I sorrow for anyone who has never seen the world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery in New
Orleans. It is the perfect graveyard, the complete graveyard, the finest graveyard in the universe. (There
is a perfection in some designs that informs the function totally. There are Danish chairs that could be
nothingbut chairs, are so totally and completelychair that if the world as we know it ended, and a billion
years from now the New Orleans horsy cockroaches became the dominant species, and they dug down
through the alluvial layers, and found one of those chairs, even if they themselves did not use chairs, were
not constructed physically for the use of chairs, had never seen a chair,still they would know it for what it
had been made to be: a chair. Because it would be the essence ofchairness . And from it, they could
reconstruct the human race in replica.That is the kind of graveyard one means when one refers to the
world-famous Saint Louis Cemetery.)

The Saint Louis Cemetery is ancient. It sighs with shadows and the comfortable bones and their
afterimages of deaths that became great merely because those who died went to be interred in the Saint
Louis Cemetery. The water table lies just eighteen inches below New Orleans тАФ there are no graves in
the earth for that reason. Bodies are entombed aboveground in crypts, in sepulchers, vaults, mausoleums.
The gravestones are all different, no two alike, each one a testament to the stonecutterтАЩs art. Only
secondarily testaments to those who lie beneath the markers.

We had reached the moment of final nightness. That ultimate moment before day began. Dawn had yet to
fill the eastern sky, yet there was a warming of tone to the night; it was the last of the downhill side of my