"Barry N. Malzberg - Transfer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

All of it has been purely business.

Business in any event for the beast. He needs to kill as I need to breathe, that creature within me who I
was always in the process of becoming ( all the strangeness I felt as a child I now attribute to the
embryonic form of the beast, beating and huddling its growing way within) takes the lives of humans as
casually as I take my midday sandwich and drink in the local cafeteria before passing on to my dismal
and clerkly affairs at the Bureau, accumulating time toward the pension credits that will be mine after
twenty or thirty years. The beast needs to kill; he draws his strength from murder as I do mine from food
and since I am merely his tenant during these struggles, a helpless (but alertly interested) altar which
dwells within the beast watching all that goes on, I can take no responsibility myself for what has
happened but put it squarely on him where it belongs.

Perhaps I should have turned myself in for treatment or seen a psychiatrist of some kind when all this
began, but what would have been the point of it? What? They would not have believed that I was
possessed; they would have thought me harmlessly crazy, and the alternative, if they did believe me,
would have been much worse: implication, imprisonment, fury. I could have convinced them. I know that
now, when I became strong enough to will myself into becoming the beast, I could have, in their very
chambers, turned myself into that monster and then they would have believed, would have taken my fears
for certainty тАж but the beast, manic in his goals, would have fallen upon those hapless psychiatrists,
interns, or social workers as he fell upon all of his nighttime victims and what then?

What then? He murders as casually and skillfully as I annotate my filings at the Bureau. He is impossible
to dissuade. No, I could not have done that. The beast and I, sentenced to dwell throughout eternity or at
least through the length of my projected life span: there may be another judgment on this someday of
some weight, but I cannot be concerned with that now. Why should I confess? What is there to confess?
Built so deeply into the cultureтАФI am a thoughtful man and have pondered this long despite my lack of
formal educational creditsтАФas to be part of the madness is the belief that confession is in itself expiation,
but I do not believe this. The admission of dreadful acts is merely to compound them through multiple
refraction and lies are thus more necessary than the truth in order to make the world work.

Oh, how I believe this. How I do believe it.

I have attempted discussions with the beast. This is not easy, but at the moment of transfer there is a
slow, stunning instant when the mask of his features has not settled upon him fully and it is possible for
me, however weakly, to speak. "Why must you do this?" I ask him. "This is murder, mass murder. These
are human beings, you know, it really is quite dreadful." My little voice pipes weakly as my own force
diminishes and the beast, transmogrified, stands before the mirror, waving his tentacles, flexing his
powerful limbs, and says then (he speaks a perfect English when he desires, although largely he does not
desire to speak), "Don't be a fool. This is my destiny, and besides, I am not human, so this is not my
problem."

This is unanswerable; it is already muted by transfer. I burrow within, and the beast takes to the streets
singing and crouching, ready once again for his tasks. Why does he need to murder? I understand that his
lust for this is as gross and simple as my own for less dreadful events; it is an urge as much a part of him
as that toward respiration. The beast is an innocent creature, immaculately conceived. He goes to do
murder as his victim goes to drink. He sees no shades of moral inference or dismay even in the bloodiest
and most terrible of the strangulations but simply does what must be done with the necessary force.
Never more. Some nights he has killed ten. The streets of the city scatter north and south with his
victims.