"James E. Gunn - The Millennium Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

Millennium Blues
 Chapter One
January 1, 2000
William S. Landis

The invitation was printed in red and framed in gold on his computer monitor:

THE TWENTY-FIRST CORPORATION
cordially invites William S. Landis
to attend a conference on the Twenty-First Century
December 28-3l, 2000
at the World Trade Center, New York City
concluding from 8 p.m. to midnight on New Millennia's Eve
with The-End-of-the-World Ball*
*A masquerade: Come dressed as your favorite catastrophe.

William S. Landis looked at the invitation with suspicion. The party was a ghoulish idea; even the
conference had a taint of the macabre, coming as it did too late to help the world through this fateful year,
perhaps too late even to speculate about the century ahead, the nature of whose early years, at least, had
already been established by the beginning of the 1990s.

His first thought was to turn it down. That always was his first thought. In fact, above his computer he
had put a sign he had found at a garage sale: Say No! But then he noticed that the computer message had
a second page. The second page said that the Twenty-First Corporation would pay him an honorarium
of $5,000 plus expenses to make a presentation at the conference, and to participate as a panelist in
responses to two other presentations.

That was as much as he made off some of his books. Apparently, as he had heard, the Twenty-First
Corporation was loaded with cash in preparation for the uncertainties of the century from which it had
taken its name.

He could attend the conference and not stay for the ball. The invitation did not include a significant other,
but then he had no significant other. If one measures life in terms of meaningful relationships, life had
passed him by. He had been a mere spectator, observing the parade of existence, content to comment on
the marvelous way the jugglers performed, the surprising shapes of the animals, and the curious passions
of the marchers. Sometimes he wondered what he had missed, but most of the time, calculating the
amount of misery compared to the quantity of bliss, he was satisfied with his choice. He had not
experienced a great many things, but he knew a lot. He knew that it was Horace Walpole who had
written, "The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel," and he would rather
think than feel.

He had even declined several New Year's Eve invitations. This year's New Year's Eve had been
celebrated by hundreds of millions, and dreaded by hundreds of millions more, who had the mistaken
idea that 1999 was the end of the millennium. As a consequence, the rest of the world was suffering from
a giant hangover. The nearly worldwide sigh of relief when midnight passed without catastrophe would
soon change into a gasp of dismay when bleary-eyed revelers turned on television or picked up their
newspapers and were informed that the second millennium really ended on December 31, 2000. The
hangover was just beginning; they would have to relive for an entire additional year the agonies of their
past year's concerns. But Landis felt as fresh and clear-of-mind as he ever did.