"Carol Emshwiller - Childhood of the Human Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

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CAROL EMSHWILLER

The Childhood
of the Human Hero*

Science fiction is an, attitude about today and what tomorrow could become. Nothing definite, nothing more than an attitude. We think, rationally enough, that in: twenty-five years we will be turning another century, the glorious year 2001. will be upon us. But who will be the ' men of that period? How are we molding them today to play their parts? Here is a glimpse of a boy who will then be a man. Your fingers are in the reality-clay, as are mine; together we are shaping his world. This then is "The Childhood of the Human Hero," the boy who will inhabit the world we are creating for him with the passing of each day.

'From Joseph Campbell.
A little bit of you in him and a little bit of me and a little bit of him in you and I see a bit of my youngest brother. He's coming in, going out, coming in, going out, and it's another world outside which might be inner space which is outer space to him. "Captain, your ship is approaching a doomed planet at twice the speed of light."

He wants to order a pair of handcuffs at $2.95

A book on ventriloquism at 98 cents

He wants a realistic, plastic, plucked chicken, $5.99

A pair of sunglasses with one-way mirror lenses

A "patented 3-D hypno-coin" that comes free with 25 lessons in hypnotism

And one hundred stick-on stamps of the scariest movie monster

Mild-mannered boy wonder looks like any other average boy, but there's a trick to it. There's more than meets the eye and good deeds are being done every day in spite of appearances.

He has a secret identity.

Going into orbit around one hot world too many, he breaks pencils with a flick of the fingers of one hand and doesn't know he's doing it. He straightens paper clips trying to remember that France has a population of 51,400,000; that the major cities are: Paris, Lille, Bordeaux, Marseilles; highest point, Mont Blanc, 15,781 feet; principal language, French.

He's the one with the new boots, just the kind he'd

always wanted; wide belt, black turtleneck sweater. Next year his hair will be even longer because that's the only way you can tell the kids in the Common Concern Club from the Young Americans for Freedom.

When he grows a mustache (this much later), it'll be the long, yellow/brown kind that curls up at the ends and he'll be smiling.

Say, did you know there's a new method that can give you powerful muscles you'll be proud to show your friends in just ten minutes a day? "Carry your great strength with prudence and humility," I say, but you've broken another ballpoint pen writing the answer to the problem of Farmer Brown who plows half an acre in twenty minutes and Farmer Jones who has plowed thirty-two acres in seventy-six hours.

He's coming in, going out, coming in, going out. It's another world entirely outside and that waltz is really the original motion-picture soundtrack from 2001.

I know you. I was a boy once myself, mother though I have become, and I know it might as well be, maybe ought to be Chichen Itza instead of Betelgeuse or some place with a lot of moons. You'll lose all that, you know, Captain, next year or the year after, but there will be greater losses, and that sonic blast was just a stalling tactic to keep you busy while they roll in this monstrous world. You have yet to face the bureaucratic creatures that crawl through rocks and can hold you helplessly imprisoned in megaliths even Though you may be in telepathic contact with the big brained friends of this universe. There are things you'd never suspect out here in reality land, and your night terrors are nothing compared to them.

You won't recognize him. I mean that man with the yellow/brown mustache coming in for a landing on some different planet farther in the future than you ever thought possible. He's of the next century, you know, and will be at his peak by 2001. Did you realize that yesterday when you asked me, "What does
`existential' mean?" and I couldn't answer so you knew? "Forget it," you said and I can't forget it, because without your existential super self you will certainly perish in wars of the future out among the satellites, overcome by cosmic thought patterns too convoluted for the human brain to contemplate, or, if not that, torn apart by humanoids in the death throes of their own identity crises, or exploded by technological advances available not only to the future but known already to the present and, if not one or more of the above, inevitably coarsened by Earthlings of your own kind. I can't save you, because even though thunder sends the cats under the bed and still brings you into my room where there can be no ghosts, no tigers, and monsters still shrivel up and die when I turn on the lights, my powers are fading. But I'm not-repeat, not-waiting for you to grow up, because that's another thing entirely.

"What's the size of a shark's brain?"

"What's the capital of Colorado?"