"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

labor is coming to fruition. He watches, forgetting to eat, almost to breathe.
In your mother's study after she dies, you find an elaborate chart of her ancestors and your father's.
You retrieve the program for it, punch it in, and idly watch a random sampling, back into time, first me
female line, then the male ... a teacher of biology in Boston, a suffragette, a corn merchant, a singer, a
Dutch fanner in New York, a British sailor, a German musician. Their faces glow in the screen,
bright-eyed, cheeks flushed with life. Someday you too will be only a aeries of images in a screen.
Smith is watching the planet Mars. The clockwork which turns the Ozo to follow the planet, even
when it is below the horizon, makes it possible for him to focus instantly on the surface, but he never does
this. He takes up his position hundreds of thousands of miles away, then slowly approaches, in order to
see the red spark grow to a disk, then to a yellow sunlit ball hanging hi darkness. Now he can make out
the surface features: Syrtis Major and Thoth-Nepenthes leading in a long gooseneck to Utopia and the
frostcap.
The image as it swells hypnotically toward him is clear and sharp, without tremor or atmospheric
distortion. It is summer in the northern hemisphere: Utopia is wide and dark. The planet fills the screen,
and now he turns northward, over the cratered desert still hundreds of miles distant A dust storm, like a
yellow veil, obscures the curved neck of Thoth-Nepenthes; then he is beyond it, drifting down to the
edge of the frostcap. The limb of the planet reappears; he floats like a glider over the dark surface tinted
with rose and violet-gray; now he can see its nubbly texture; now he can make out individual plants. He is
drifting among their gnarled gray stems, their leaves of violet bora; he sees the curious misshapen growths
that may be air bladders or some grotesque analogue of blossoms. Now, at the edge of the screen,
something black and spindling leaps. He follows it instantly, finds it, brings it hugely magnified into the
center of the screen: a thing like a hairy beetle, its body covered with thick black hairs or spines; it stands
on six jointed legs, waving its antennae, its mouth parts busy. And its four bright eyes stare into his,
across forty million miles.
Smith's hair got whiter and thinner. Before the 1992 Crash, he made heavy contributions to the
International Red Cross and to volunteer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. He got drunk
periodically, but always alone. From 1993 to 1996 he stopped reading the newspapers.
He wrote down the coordinates for the plane crash in which his daughter and her husband had died,
but never used them.
At intervals while dressing or looking into the bathroom mirror, he stared as if into an invisible camera
and raised one finger. In his last years he wrote some poems.
We know his name. Patient researchers, using advanced scanning techniques, followed his letters
back through the postal system and found him, but by that time he was safely dead.
The whole world has been at peace for more than a generation. Crime is almost unheard of. Free
energy has made the world rich, but the population is stable, even though early detection has wiped out
most diseases. Everyone can do whatever he likes, providing his neighbors would not disapprove, and
after all, their views are the same as his own.
Yon are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at
your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched
yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed
baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your
bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers,
clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill,
and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that
someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another. . . .
Forever.


from Competition 13:
Excerpts from myopic early SF or Utopian novels