"Sharon Green - Ram Song" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Sharon)

bright smile on her face. She would choose immortality, he
thought, and later, in the privacy of her tiny cabin, she would
weep at her loss.
Each time he viewed the ancient ceremony of Renascence the
memories replayed, and again he wondered how he might have
answered. The question he had never been asked spoke in his mind:
How do you choose, Kurt Kraus? And what if he had denied his
immortality? What if, instead, he had chosen his music, his
creativity?тАФa blaze of being gone in a flash of time, a tiny sun
gone nova, then dark? A firefly? He tried to peer into the dark
well of distant memories and wondered if the spark of what he
might have been could still be seen after ten thousand years.
He looked across the shallows once again. The ring now. They
placed it on the finger of the first girl as if she were a bride.
He could see her looking at it, and a bit of the wonder crept into
his heart. A simple ring of ancient design, the golden lazy eight
of infinity, broken, vanishing into black, and then the words:
"For Art."
Cycles.
It was strange about memories, he thought. Strange how something
could stay in his mind in tiny protein coils for millennia while
other things could
4 RAM SONG
vanish without a trace. No, not without a trace. Vague thoughts
glided in and out of his mindтАФ incomplete hints that lay just
beyond his grasp. They seemed to be dreamlike echoes of things he
almost knew, things he should know. But just why he should know


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Acknowledgments

them, he could not say.
At the beginning of his retreat these shadowy, fragmented thoughts
tormented his dreams, and he would waken in the dark to feel the
cold sweat gathering on his body.
Coming to consciousness like a man anesthetized, he tried to
validate himself with the memories that would not come. He had to
remember. Had to. He tossed on his narrow pallet and struggled for
a hold on the cloudy shards of his mind. Then, as surrogate winds
blew over his sweaty body and chilled him, he wrapped himself in a
robe and listened to the faint sounds of lake and woods until at
last he could sleep again.
Now, although the fragments still lodged in his brain, they seemed
less important, less threatening.
The midday winds were beginning, riffling over the silver blue
lake, tossing the leaves of the trees, sending tiny seeds and
pollen on currents of air to renew the forest and the fields. The
wind was cool on his face and pleasant. As it rose, it sang in the
leaves and brought with it another sound. Voices. Closer than they