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

beyond measure. But Carl has provided a measure for his entrapment. The heavens
are, in retrograde time, exploding, the stars igniting. Locked into a space so limited
that he can barely move, Thomas trembles as his hands tremble on the instruments.
The cluster, however distant, however removed in time, surges with fire. Soon, at
this insurmountable distance, it will reach with bands of fire to gather him. There is
nothing that he can do. There is a fracture across these heavens that will overwhelm
him. Thomas quivers in his wretched enclosure. Priest in a coffin. Neither
astrophysics nor the force of divine revelation could save him now.
In this enclosure of wire and darkness, shielded by little more than the illusions of
distance and his own damaged perception, Father Thomas knows that all is out of
his control. Somewhere outside the arc of his vision the great, wounded star is
boiling, shedding itself. Plunging toward Calvary. It is surely best that he is alone
here, that he has been dispatched on this terrible exploration to hear Carl's
admonition. Tear down the curtain of God. He cannot speak for what might have
happened otherwise, if someone had been beside him.

Solitary priest in a coffin. Every perceived star is alive with its own extinction, just as
on Calvary Christ burned in death fire. In a coffin, witness to this final and deafening
light.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


Memory of the Garden at Etten

Gazing at the crinkling stars in the gauzy, funny-looking black sky, Rachel stands still
as a statue before her window. She knows she is having an episode, but she is not
biting her tongue or making echoey noises, at least not yet. Maybe she will not. She's
not shaking, not trembling; in fact, it doesn't even seem that she is breathing now,
just looking into the swirley sky, looking at the image of the strange man
superimposed on the stars and the night. She imagines then that she is up there with
him, scrunched into the seat of something like a car except that through the big
window she sees not a road but stars and lightning.

She and the man are drifting in space, drifting in the stars nits themselves.

Rachel may be having one of her episodes, but she is still sensitive to everything that
is going on around her. As if from a great distance she can hear Mommy and Daddy
still making noise in the bedroom. Once she had run in there to stop them, to stop
Daddy from hurting Mommy, but Mommy said that it was all right, that they were
playing; and Rachel decided then and there that she never wanted to play that way.
After a few minutes Mommy stops screaming and breathing. Everything stops.
Rachel concentrates on the man in the car in the sky. She can see him dimly; he is
sitting beside her. He is dressed in black like a priest.

He is a priest.

She is still in her funny pajamas.