"Tom Purdom-The Redemption of August" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

The Redemption of August
by Tom Purdom
This story copyright 2000 by Tom Purdom. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


How can someone who is not a professional man of letters make an unknown audience understand
what it means to live under the Germans? How can he convey the reality of Prussian despotism to people
who live in a society that has never been deformed by such a catastrophe -- people who live in a world
that has never been deformed by such a catastrophe? You have never been forced to stare at the sewage
the German communications satellites pour into the living rooms of Europe. You have never been
questioned by a German GD man who makes you concentrate on every word he utters whiie he speaks
a human language with all the grace of someone who has spent his life grunting and barking. You have
never seen a classroom of French children standing at attention while they sing -- in their own languages
-- a "hymn" in praise of the very man -- the German Kaiser himself -- who is the ultimate symbol of their
degradation.
I realize you may not know what a "communications satellite" is. I am assuming no one will read this
for at least fifty years. If you happen to have opened the envelope before then, I can only tell you that
someday people will transmit images -- pictures that move -- in the same way they now transmit radio
and telephone messages. Every home will have a device that can receive such pictures. In theory, every
citizen of the civilized world will be able to enjoy, inexpensively and conveniently, every work of genius
ever created for the stage. The plays of Racine. the operas of Lully -- they will all, in theory, be at the
disposal of the most isolated farmer.
In the milieu in which I endured most of my early life, however, there were few occasions on which the
satellites transmitted such treasures. Hour after hour, day after day, the minds of the European people
were distracted by cheap entertainments chosen by the fat-rumped oafs who had spread Kultur across
Europe at the point of a bayonet.
One of my uncles spent six years of his life in prison because he had dared to resist our German
"overseers" and the "friendly government" that shined their Prussian boots. I myself was forced to live in
exile at the southern tip of Africa. From my twenty-third birthday until I was almost forty -- through all
the most vigorous years of my young manhood -- I was cut off from my language... from the art, and
music, and food and wine of my own people... from all the familiar daily realities that feed the soul of the
true patriot.
***


My name is Alain Varess. I am writing this in the year 1914 but I was born in Lyon in 1971. Only two
months ago. I was breathing the poisoned air of the ninth year of the twenty-first century. Anyone who
happens to read this during the next few years will be convinced I am a lunatic. Fifty years from now --
when gigantic airplanes roar across the skies and human beings routinely use electronic entertainment
devices -- my story will seem more believable. If Mr. "Greenway" is right, my readers may even be living
with communications satellites and electronic information systems by then. And only a few years beyond
that -- before the end of the century -- you will see the beginning of the research that brought me -- and
the man I had come to foil -- on a journey through time itself.
I do not fully understand the scientific discoveries that brought me here. I was only an administrator --
an accountant -- at the observatory that employed me. I can only tell you the principle I used had