"Barry N. Malzberg and Jack Dann - The Starry Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

attack; and he interprets and reinterprets that moment of holy calmness when he had
that pure vision of the stars bloating, inflated by some cosmic calamity, and the
universe shifting, dying, tearing itself into rebirth

It was then that he had started painting the angels. It had begun as he was applying
paint to the exploding sky, and suddenly he had seen a perfect angel transposed
above the steeple of the chapel, a wingless angel, a child with cerulean blue eyes and
golden plaited hair held with a tortoiseshell comb. She was wrapped in a cobalt blue
robe with zinc white edging. This angel could have been one of the Two Putti by
Andrea del Sarto in the Uffizi in Florence, but then she dissolved, evaporated into
the angry, coarse swirls of stars and atmosphere.

Vincent felt an overwhelming sense of loss. Fearful of losing the image, he threw the
painting to the floor and grasped another canvas to bring her back to life. The
background was the sameтАФexploding stars, swirling stars, bands of stars
concatenating in the blue-bleached atmosphere, in the blue night; and she stood
before him, looking past him at other heavens, other exploding stars.

The angel stared past him, her eyes as remote as the arching heavens.

"The stars knit," she whispered.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


Image of the Host

Priest in a coffin: Thomas hovers at some unimaginable distance from the ruddy
Antares Cluster, so threatening even at this great remove. Why is he alone? This has
always been for him, for them, for all the other priests in coffins, an imponderable so
vast as to approach Crucifixion, or one of those Stations on the way.

The stars are ratcheting, pinwheeling the sky.

Astrophysics has put him in this surveyor starship, but it is faith which is now the
truer entrapment, faith which has turned him with whatever longing is possible to the
distant, betrayed God behind this fierce canvas. Father Thomas, trapped inside this
perished cluster, evokes the specter of a man whom he has not seen in forty years,
the senile priest, Carl, who stalked the seminary and muttered, "We will tear down
the curtain before God, and we will find his stricken face our own. Our own, our
own: no wafer but blindness."

Portent. Mystery. In this recollection Carl is unyielding, grants no forgiveness. "Rip
aside the firmament it is decreed and our vanity will show us nothing at all." Dead
decades later Thomas is still seeking response, still trying to find a way to renounce
the ravings of the mad, useless old man.

Thomas has been a priest in a coffin now for a period of time so attenuated that it is