"Barry N Malzberg - Ready When You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

interred with those of his parents in a small mausoleum in the borough of
Queens. Vanity, Finzie thinks, all is vanity and watches three young
women, glorious in their youth and necessity, gambol on the sands before
him. None can be older than fourteen and each in her special way has
destroyed him. He is the remnant, he thinks, of their design. "Have you
need of anything?" the bodyguard, detailed by his agent and studio to keep
him company in these final days asks. "Can I service you anything, sir?"
Finzie in whose right hand half of our possibilities and all of our dreams
will soon enough dwell looks at the man absently, his face for the moment
stripped of pain and pleasure as well, a perfect and inscrutably vacant
frame upon which anything at all could have been inscribed. "Only my
history," Finzie says. "It is a superhero who can survive a fatal fire,
don't you think? How remarkable but I seem to have left my history
behind."
"Ah sir," the bodyguard says with exquisite and poised understanding, "Ah
sir, it is this lack of history which has given you this power," and
reacting to the sheer and mortifying truth of this observation, Finzie Ч

Puts aside the necessary equipment of the auteur, the cape, the mask, the
special wire, the equations of history and thrall which have given him
such awful if inconsequent power, puts these toys away now as so long ago
the fire had put away that necessitous part of himself. Finzie puts aside
the clutter of the superhero because, having transcended fire and destiny,
he no longer needs to be one, needs the costume no more and leaving a
warning for Eve Harlow and the others that they will have to make do with
crumpled mask, hidden cloak, the all-encompassing, serious and now
latter-period Finzie whose Ч

Ч Distraught and distressing visions will define what if anything will be
remembered of the shining city on the hill, Finzie the auteur without mask
or cape breaks into groans much like those he had groaned against the neck
of Eve Harlow and then sinks to the ground, weeping. Here comes the fire.
The fire is coming. Dolly in on camera, superhero no more but only a pietр
of Finzie unmasked in Eve's rambunctious embrace. Freeze frame. Freeze it
until Ч
Ч Until the end of everlasting fire.

And his works the world to come.