"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

"Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!" Teresa said. "Fry them, Peter."
And Peter took the pretty fish kids that came from the water and
began to fix them for the pan.
This had taken the longest to get used to. But when you have so many
of them -- more than ten thousand, and more coming all the time -- and when
they are so good; and when, moreover, they are already flesh of your flesh.
Peter Feeney fixed the fish kids for the pan. And out of his
fullness and mingled emotions, salt tears rolled down his shining face to
the salt sea.


HOW THEY GAVE IT BACK

He was the mayor of Big Island. Giuseppe Juan Sehiome O'Hanlon was
his name, John the mayor, a shining black man. He was born into a political
family and was given the names to please as many groups as possible. He had
once been of imposing appearance and quiet dignity. He was not now. He
shrilled and keened and moaned, and sometimes he was irrational.
 It was his leg that hurt him, and his soul.
His leg hurt him because of the pin clear through it, the pin that
was part of the shackle. This shackle could not be unlocked mechanically. It
was a psychic-coded lock on the shackle, and it could only be released when
John had somehow fulfilled his job and obtained his own release. The shackle
bound his leg not only to his desk but also to a steel stanchion that was
part of the steel frame of the building.
John's soul hurt him because Big Island was no longer the great
thing to which he had been devoted. It had never been so in his lifetime. It
was neo-jungle now, probably the most savage of them all. Even now there
were fires burning on the floor above him and on the floor below him. There
were always fires burning somewhere in the building, in every building that
still had anything that would burn There were rats in the room, in every
room, but perhaps John saw more of them than were there. He lived in
perpetual delirium.
There were (he knew, though he could no longer go out and see)
people unburied in the streets, people knifed down hourly, people crazy and
empty-eyed or glitter-eyed. There were horrible hom-music and git-fiddle
music and jangle shouting; and he prisoner for life in his own office. This
was not to be a great administrator of a great city. The emphasis had
somehow shifted. But he had loved the city and the island, or the memory of
them. And this hurt his soul.
"You have to stay on the job and run the place for the rest of your
life," Commissioner Kreger had told John the mayor just before the
commissioner had cut and run for it. "There will, of course, be no more
elections. The burlesque that brought you in was enough to end the process.
It was fiasco."
"It was not," John the mayor moaned in pain. "It was high triumph,
the man of the people called to head the people, a noble thing, the climax
and sole goal of my life. I won it finally. They can't take that away from
me."
"How does it taste, John?"