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

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Five years was not long enough to ensure that life could always be good. One night the black-caps came
for me.

I was, as ever, alone. My life was solitary, my mood introspective. I had no friends other than whores. I
lived for my art, working through its mysterious agenda, post-Acizzone, unique, perhaps ultimately futile.

I was in my storage depot, obsessively rearranging my boards again, placing and replacing the sentinels in
the corridors. Earlier that day I had hired a carter to bring down my five most recent works and since the
man left I had been slowly moving them into place, touching them, holding them, arranging them.

The black-caps entered the building without my being aware of them. I was absorbed in a painting I had
completed the week before. I was holding it so that my fingers were wrapped around the back of the
board but my palms were pressing lightly against the paint at the edges.

The painting dealt obliquely with an incident that had occurred while I was in the army in the south. Night
had fallen while I was on patrol alone and I had had difficulty getting back to our lines. For an hour I
wandered in the dark and cold, slowly freezing. In the end someone had found me and led me back to
our trenches, but until then I had been in terror of death.

Post-Acizzone, I had depicted the extreme fright I experienced: total darkness, a bitter wind, a chill that
struck through to the bone, ground so broken that you could not walk without stumbling, a constant
threat from unseen enemies, loneliness, silence enforced by panic, distant explosions.

The painting was a comfort to me.

I surfaced from my comfort to find four black-caps standing back from me, watching me. They were
carrying their batons in holsters. Terror struck me, as if with a physical blow.

I made a sound, an inarticulate throat-noise, involuntary, like a trapped animal. I wanted to speak to
them, shout at them, but all I was capable of was a bestial sound. I drew breath, tried again. This time the
noise I made was halting, as if fear had added a stammer to the moan.

Hearing this, registering my fright, the black-caps drew their batons. They moved casually, in no hurry to
start. I backed away, brushing against my painting, causing it to fall.

The men had no faces I could see: their capped helmets covered their heads, placed a smoked visor
across their eyes, had a raised lip to protect their mouth and jaw.

Four clicks as the synaptic batons were armedтАФthey were raised to the strike position.

"You've been discharged, trooper!" one of the men said and contemptuously threw a scrap of paper in
my direction. It fluttered at once, fell close to his boots. "Discharge for a coward!"

I said тАж but I could only breathe in, shuddering, and say nothing.

There was another way out of the building that only I could know, through the under-floor warren. One