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

spilling from an immense smoking factory that overlooked the bay. Beyond this industrial area was a long
tract of undeveloped shoreline, the tangle of rainforest briefly blocking any further sight of civilization.
Then, after rounding a hilly promontory and passing a high jetty wall, a large town built on a range of low
hills came suddenly into sight, stretching away in all directions, my view of it distorted by the shimmering
heat that spread out from the land across the busy waters of the harbor. We were of course forbidden
from knowing the identity of our stop, but I had my map and I already knew the name.

The island was Muriseay, the largest of the islands in the Archipelago and one of the most important.
It would be hard to underestimate the impact this discovery had on me. Muriseay's name came swimming
up out of the blank pool that was my memory.

At first it was just an identifying word on the map: a name printed in letters larger than the ones used for
other islands. It puzzled me. Why should this word, this foreign name, mean something to me? I had been
stirred by the sight of the other islands, but although the resonances were subtle I had felt no close
identification with any of them.

Then we approached the island and the ship started to follow the long coastline. I had watched the
distant land slip by, affected more and more, wondering why.

When we came to the bay, to the entrance to the harbor, and I felt the heat from the town drifting across
the quiet water towards us, something at last became clear to me.

I knew about Muriseay. The knowledge came to me as a memory from the place where I had no
memory.

Muriseay was something or somewhere I had known, or it represented something I had done, or
experienced, as a child. It was a whole memory, discrete, telling me nothing about the rest. It involved a
painter who had lived on Muriseay and his name was Rascar Acizzone.

Rascar Acizzone? Who was that? Why did I suddenly remember the name of a Muriseayan painter when
otherwise I was a hollow shell of amnesia?

I was able to explore this memory no further: without warning all troops were mustered to billets and with
the other men who had drifted to the upper decks I was forced to return to the mess-decks. I descended
to the bowels of the ship resentfully. We were kept below for the rest of the day and night, as well as for
much of the day that followed.

Although I suffered in the airless, sweltering hold with all the others, it gave me time to think. I closed
myself off, ignored the noise of the other men and silently explored this one memory that had returned.

When the larger memory is blank, anything that suddenly seems clear becomes sharp, evocative, heavy
with meaning. I gradually remembered my interest in Muriseay without learning anything else about
myself.

I was a boy, a teenager. Not long ago, in my short life. I learned somehow of a colony of artists who had
gathered in Muriseay Town the previous century. I saw reproductions of their work somewhere, perhaps
in books. I investigated further and found that several of the originals were kept in the city's art gallery. I
went there to see them for myself. The leading painter, the eminence within the group, was the artist
called Rascar Acizzone.