"02 - The Death of Dr. Island by Gene Wolfe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

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GENE WOLFE

The Death
of Doctor Island

"In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm
and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands
man, facing now one and now the other . . . ." C. G.
Jung said that, and he might have been describing
Gene Wolfe, who seems frighteningly familiar with
both realms. In this story he will take you by the hand
and lead you from one to the other with such disarm-
ing ease you may never know when the transition oc-
curred. A true Jungian story told in Freudian terms, an
exploration into the inner realm, that is what "The
Death of Doctor Island" is. And if you recognize your
self as a player, or an aspect of one of the players in
that inner realm, don't be surprised. Nothing is accidental.
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,

To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,

Where the green swell is in the havens dumb, And out of the swing of the sea.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

A grain of sand, teetering on the brink of the pit, trembled and fell in; the ant lion at the bottom angrily flung it out again. For a moment there was quiet. Then the entire pit, and a square meter of sand around it, shifted drunkenly while two coconut palms bent to watch. The sand rose, pivoting at one edge, and the scarred head of a boy appeared-a stubble of brown hair threatened to erase the marks of the sutures; with dilated eyes hypnotically dark he paused, his neck just where the ant lion's had been; then, as though goaded from below, he vaulted up and onto the beach, turned, and kicked sand into the dark hatchway from which he had emerged. It slammed shut. The boy was about fourteen.

For a time he squatted, pushing the sand aside and trying to find the door. A few centimeters down, his hands met a gritty, solid material which, though neither concrete nor sandstone, shared the qualities of both sand-filled organic plastic. On it he scraped his fingers raw, but he could not locate the edges of the hatch.

Then he stood and looked about him, his head moving continually as the heads of certain reptiles go back and forth, with no pauses at the terminations of the movements. He did this constantly, ceaselessly always-and for that reason it will not often be described again, just as it will not be mentioned that he breathed. He did; and as he did, his head, like a rearing snake's, turned from side to side. The boy was thin, and naked as a frog.

Ahead of him the sand sloped gently down toward sapphire water; there were coconuts on the beach, and seashells, and a scuttling crab that played with the finger-high edge of each dying wave. Behind him there were only palms and sand for a long distance, the palms growing ever closer together as they moved away from the water until the forest of their columniated trunks seemed architectural; like some palace maze becoming as it progressed more and more draped with creepers and lianas with green, scarlet, and yellow leaves, the palms interspersed with bamboo and deciduous trees dotted with flaming orchids until almost at the limit of his sight the whole ended in a spangled wall whose predominant color was blackgreen.

The boy walked toward the beach, then down the beach until he stood in knee-deep water as warm as blood. He dipped his fingers and, tasted it-it was fresh, with no hint of the disinfectants to which he was accustomed. He waded out again and sat on the sand about five meters up from the high-water mark, and after ten minutes, during which he heard no sound but the wind and the murmuring of the surf, he threw back his head and began to scream. His screaming was high-pitched, and each breath ended in a gibbering, ululant note, after which came the hollow,- iron gasp of the next indrawn breath. On one occasion he had screamed in this way, without cessation, for fourteen
hours and twenty-two minutes, at the end of which a nursing nun with an exemplary record stretching back seventeen years had administered an injection without the permission of the attending physician.

After a time the boy paused-not because he was tired, but in order to listen better. There was, still, only the sound of the wind in the palm fronds and the murmuring surf, yet he felt that he had heard a voice. The boy could be quiet as well as noisy, and he was quiet now, his left hand sifting white sand as clean as salt between its fingers while his right tossed tiny pebbles like beach-glass beads into the surf.

"Hear me," said the surf. "Hear me. Hear me."

"I hear you," the boy said.