"Charles L Grant - Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

A debriefing, then, which lasted for something like an hour. More, if you were new to growing without aging. Less, if you'd been in the system for a year or more.
The first children/adults would not be through the entire program for, the director once told me, at least another ten months. But, if you listened to him carefully and believed his raving, things were moving along just splendidly.

I could see it without much prompting.
Eleven-year-olds with graying hair and wrinkles and a walk that bordered on the burlesque of infirmity.
A girl twelve with the mind of a woman.
A boy ten with the rebellion sponged-exorcised out of him, exorcised and leaving him without dreams of how it had been when he had been ...but he never had been ...young.
It was, admittedly, exciting. And the nightmares I had about the possible consequences were only just that. So I rationalized whenever I went to the studio. After all, frankly, it was a job. An actor's job. Just about the only one left.
I had been in Lofrisco, wandering about that coast-long cityplex, when Vivian-my-agent called me and brought me back to Philayork. It was the break, she told me confidentlythe chance for exposure, and the cash, that I needed.
"Listen, Gordy," she'd said, "these kids will know you for the rest of their lives! Not by name, but they'll recognize your face! They'll want to see you on stage-if that's what you're still after--on the comunit channels, the cinema bowls. You'll have it made, you idiot. You can't pass this up."
And, to be honest, I hadn't. But neither had I forgotten the near-empty houses I had played to when I had managed to wheedle permission to leave those joyhall holovid arenas and cinema bowls.
Near empty.
Partially full.
There had been five in which I was an understudy. I didn't much care. It was live, actors and audience, and I drifted from one theater to another waiting for the chance to get in on the action. But they all folded in less than a month, the audiences deserting them long before the last curtain. Drifting in, stalking out, curious more than anything, and no one bothered to wait for the players who slunk from their failures from unlocked stage doors. Several times I tried to ask someone just why he was leaving, but never got an answer that cured the question.
Finally, when I cornered one of the directors and demanded to know why her play was a failure, she only snapped an arm toward the gap that was the stage and shrugged. "I guess we're running out of gimmicks. We need a new one. I don't know. The way things are going, I don't really care."
The Storm's Eye had three dozen sets, and auditorium
seats that slowly tilted back to focus audience attention on a holovid simulation of the typhoon threatening the actors on stage.
Great World Yearning had catapults and springboards, trapezes, and a 360-degree stage.
Blessing had four orchestras, three tenors, waterfalls, ceilingatorms, a marching band, rehearsals for the audience's instrument parts, and a prominent reviewer who insisted on getting every name in the theater for his comprehensive critique.
Take This Crown had seventy-nine speaking parts and four burnings at the stake.
Where Hath God Raged had a planetarium, an espernarrator, and a colonist from the Moon.
Three playwright/producers had created them all. And when the last one gave up hope, I took the slip marking the deposit to my account and wandered from theater to theater. Something, I knew, had died in both artist and observer. Then, taking the easy way out, I managed to locate and assault with tears and fists all three of the creators one by one. All in darkness, I sought out those so-called playwrights, and after each attack I fled until my lungs burned me to a halt.
My justification at the time was simple: They were murderers, of something I could not yet understand. They had been part of a conspiracy to kill off words.
I wandered, waiting to be caught for my crime, listening for the accusing scream of a WatchDog swooping angrily beneath the Walkways, netting me, lifting me, locking me away.
I had to have been mad to have done it. But there were no still and small voices directing my attacks, no sudden blind fury that drove me to the call of insanity that guided my hand, only those questions, all beginning with why? and the knowledge that the playwrights had been midwives to disaster, had birthed disasters before, and were part and parcel of what I knew was the dying of a dying art.
Yet there was no feeling of catharsis.
I had done it.
Nothing more.
So I sat in front of the dressing-room mirror and thought of the tiger and its claws, and of the tiny director who was forcing me unknowingly to remember.

It was a play within a play within a play within a dream, -
Like a beautiful thing I had seen once, and from which all :I could remember was a tiny, shattered, fragile glass unicorn.
I pushed away from the table and dressed as best I could with the patches pulling at my shoulders and ribs. My fingers fumbled as I snapped my shirt closed. My thighs were elastic as I slipped on my boots. Sooner or later I would have to tell someone what I had done. There had been nothing on the news and, though I wondered, I kept :1 silent.
But not for long. ra
Helena.
A studio flyer took me to the entrance of my Keyloft and, once inside the lobby, I sagged against the liftube frame and ~' held on. Looking down. Looking up. Rising free, falling free. No need to worry, Gordon, old son, the magic of science will give you faith.

2

I had been born, raised, and eventually cast willingly adrift in Thilayork, the largest of the East Coast cityplexes. My father was the owner/manager of a joyhall which, in addition to the usual game rooms, gaming rooms, and stunt rooms, had a small cinema arena. None of the major features played there, but the minor ones were nevertheless sufficient to lure me from spools and tapes, to spend days and hours drifting through the stories that holoed around me. It wasn't the technics that ensnared me, enraptured me, but the men and women who portrayed the characters, and the men and women who paid their small admissions to eavesdrop on the plots_-

("Marts, over here, hurry! Listen to what this guy is saying about the Count." "You listen, Will, I'm trying to find out what happened to the Colonel. We'll meet by the Grand Canyon when I'm done,")

They all knew it was sham and that they could if they wished put their hands through heads and cannon fire and the rings of Saturn or the domes on the Moon. But naturally they wouldn't. They listened, compared notes, reconstructed stories, and returned for what they had missed.
By the time I was in University, I succumbed to a tempts-
tion, which was easy enough since I knew most of the plots by rote. I stole time here, sleep there, and several times managed to last through nearly three quarters of a show before anyone realized I wasn't part of the action. The idea that I could be something and someone I wasn't intrigued me. I did research, spent time in regular theaters in the less-visited parts of the city, and changed my emphasis in University without, telling my father. When he did find out, and heard my dreams, one of us lost, and I left.
Studied. Learned.
Discovered agents and sold myself to Vivian. Who laughed at my studies. ("My God, Gordy, nobody needs a script on the stage anymore; who told you you needed to learn how to memorize?") She took me quite literally in hand and showed me what show business was, outside of the school.
For eighteen years, then, I managed a fairly steady and obviously unspectacular living playing that man over there in the corner talking to the beautiful blonde, and that wounded trooper crawling through the Martian sandstorm, and that body, and that face, and . . . and. Until, between takes, I found myself wandering back into theaters that had stages and audiences and waterfalls and . . . and...
There's nothing to say that would stand alone as a reason. I loved it, that's all. Loved it, and hated it, because it didn't take long for me to see that something was wrong. Lethally wrong.