"Christopher Priest - The Discharge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Priest Christopher)

By this time I was able to earn enough money to afford to live in a small rented apartment. I supported
myself by working in the kitchen of one of the harbor-side bars. I was eating well, sleeping regularly,
coming to terms with the extra mental blankness with which the war had left me. I felt as if my four years
under arms had merely been time lost, an ellipsis, another area of forgotten life. In Mesterline I began to
sense a full life extending around me, an identity, a past regainable and a future that could be envisaged.

I bought paper and pencils, borrowed a tiny stool, began the habit of setting myself up in the shade of the
harbor wall, quickly drawing a likeness of anyone who walked into sight. I soon discovered that the
Mesters were natural exhibitionistsтАФwhen they realized what I was doing most of them would laughingly
pose for me, or offer to return when they had more time, or even suggest they could meet me privately so
that I could draw them again and in more intimate detail. Most of these offers came from young women.
Already I was finding Mester women irresistibly beautiful. The harmony between their loveliness and the
drowsy contentment of the Mesterline life inspired vivid graphic images in my mind that I found endlessly
alluring to try to draw. Life spread even more fully around me, happiness grew. I started dreaming in
color.

Then a troopship arrived in Mesterline Town, breaking its voyage southwards to the war, its decks
crammed with young conscripts.

It did not dock in the harbor of the town but moored a distance offshore. Lighters came ashore bringing
hard currency to buy food and other materials and to replenish water supplies. While the transactions
went on, an escouade of black-caps prowled the streets, staring intently at all men of military age, their
synaptic batons at the ready. At first paralysed with fear at the sight of them, I managed to hide from
them in the attic room of the town's only brothel, dreading what would happen if they found me.

After they had gone and the troopship had departed, I walked around Mesterline Town in a state of
dread and disquiet.

My litany of names had a meaning after all. It was not simply an incantation of imagined names with a
ghostly reality. It constituted a memory of my actual experience. The islands were connected but not in
the way I had been trustingтАФa code of my own past, which when deciphered would restore me to
myself. It was more prosaic than that: it was the route the troopships took to the south.

Yet it remained an unconscious message. I had made it mine, I had recited it when no one else could
know it.

I had been planning to stay indefinitely in Mesterline, but the unexpected arrival of the troopship soured
everything. When I tried next to draw beneath the harbor wall I felt myself exposed and nervous. My
hand would no longer respond to my inner eye. I wasted paper, broke pencils, lost friends. I had
reverted to being a steffer.

On the day I left Mesterline the youngest of the whores came to the quay. She gave me a list of names,
not of islands but of her friends who were working in other parts of the Dream Archipelago. As we sailed
I committed the names to memory, then threw the scrap of paper in the sea.

Fifteen days later I was on Piqay, an island I liked but which I found too similar to Mesterline, too full of
memories that I was transplanting from the shallow soil of my memory. I moved on from Piqay to
Paneron, a long journey that passed several other islands and the Coast of Helvard's Passion, a
stupendous reef of towering rock, shadowing the coast of the island interior that lay beyond.