"Recording Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

treat me like a ruler -- is that it? Or a god?"
"The Preservers departed long ago. These are the end times."
Angel said dismissively, "There are always those who believe they live at the
end of history. We thought that we lived at the end of history, when every star
system in the Galaxy had been mapped, every habitable world settled."
For a moment, Mr Naryan thought that she would tell him of where she had been,
but she added, "I was told that the Preservers, who I suppose were my
descendants, made the different races, but each race calls itself human, even
the ones who don't look like they could have evolved from anything that ever
looked remotely human."
"The Shaped call themselves human because they have no other name for what they
have become, innocent and fallen alike. After all, they had no name before they
were raised up. The citizens of Sensch remain innocent. They are our ...
responsibility."
He had not meant for it to sound like a plea.
"You're not doing all that well," Angel said, and started to tell him about the
Change War she had tangled with upriver, on the way to this, the last city at
the midpoint of the world.
It was a long, complicated story, and she kept stopping to ask Mr Naryan
questions, most of which, despite his extensive readings of the Puranas, he was
unable to answer. As she talked, Mr Naryan transcribed her speech on his tablet.
She commented that a recording device would be better, but by reading back a
long speech she had just made he demonstrated that his close diacritical marks
captured her every word.
"But that is not its real purpose, which is an aid to fix the memory in my
head."
"You listen to peoples' stories."
"Stories are important. In the end they are all that is left, all that history
leaves us. Stories endure." And Mr Naryan wondered if she saw what was all too
clear to him, the way her story would end, if she stayed in the city.
Angel considered his words. "I have been out of history a long time," she said
at last. "I'm not sure that I want to be a part of it again." She stood up so
quickly that she knocked her stool over, and left.
Mr Naryan knew better than to follow her. That night, as he sat enjoying a
cigarette on his balcony, under the baleful glare of the Eye of the Preservers,
a remote came to him. Dreen's face materialised above the remote's silver
platter and told him that the woman's shipmates knew that she was here. They
were coming for her.



As the ship draws closer, looming above the glowing lighter that tows it, Mr
Naryan begins to make out its shape. It is a huge black wedge composed of tiers
of flat plates that rise higher than the tallest towers of the city. Little
lights, mostly red, gleam here and there within its ridged carapace. Mr Naryan
brushes mosquitoes from his bare arms, watching the black ship move beneath a
black sky empty except for the Eye of the Preservers and a few dim halo stars.
Here, at the midpoint of the world, the Home Galaxy will not rise until winter.
The crowd has grown. It becomes restless. Waves of emotion surge back and forth.
Mr Naryan feels them pass through the citizens packed around him, although he