"Kim Stanley Robinson - A Short, Sharp Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

leaning over his face and questioning still, each word slower, louder, more drawn out: тАЬ'Is it dull, sore,
taut, tender? Is it rasping, splitting, exhausting, sickening? Is it suffocating, frightful, punishing? Vicious,
wretched? Blinding? Horrible? Killing? Excruciating? Unbearable?"

Then they got his face to the glossy surface, and the reflected visage within was that of a complete
stranger, puffy and thick necked, eyes bulging outтАФI have never looked like that, Thel tried to say,
certain he was dying. Compared to this the flex X would have been bliss, he thought, and with one last
glimpse of Tinou's laughing face he was through the glass and gone.



10. Through the Mirror



Blue stars ahead, red behind. Flare of an oil lamp in the library. We know more than our senses ever tell
us, but how? How? Old brown globe, bookcases, beyond it a glassine sphere, the image of a wall. Milky
black of the galactic core, tumbling down, down, down, down. Emergency landing. Emergence. The
sensuous rise to consciousness.

Splayed on riprap, the taste of ocean wrack in his throat. Once with his parents he tripped and smashed
his nose, vivid image of sunny pain and a chocolate ice cream, down by the canals filled with trash, a
glassy sheen like the taste of blood suffusing every sundrenched manifestation of the world. Filled with
sudden grief at the lost past, Thel sat up shakily and wiped his nose, spat red. Bloody spit on uneven
paving stones, crowded with dead weeds. The whole village of Oia was in ruins, the walls just a block or
two high. Dark wind was keening through him and the weeds rustled, it had been centuries and clearly he
would never see the swimmer on the night beach again, it was past and irrecoverable. All his past was
gone for good even if he could remember it; given the sense of loss for what little he could remember, it
was perhaps for the best that so much was forgotten. But he knew he had had a life, childhood,
adolescence, he felt its intensity and knew it would never return no matter what he did, even if he
remembered every instant of it perfectly, as he felt he did, all of it right there behind some impermeable
membrane in his mind, pressing against his thoughts until the ache of it filled everything.

And yet really it didn't matter if he remembered or not. Live a life and seize it to you with an infant's fierce
clench of the fist, it still would slip away as lovely as the mountain sky at dusk and never come back
again: not the moment in the dim library, the noon by the poolside, that moonlit beach and the warm
sandy touch, none of it, none of it, none of it. How he loved his past in that moment, how he wanted it
back! Eternal recurrence, as the sorcerers had said; ah, it would almost be worth it to be a clockwork
mechanism, a bronze creature of destiny, if you could then have it over and over and over. As long as it
felt new at every recurrence, who cared? He was a creature of destiny in any case, impelled by forces
utterly beyond his control. To move his forefinger left rather than right was an enormous exertion against
fate, anything more was too much to ask, it would be only water splashing uphill for a moment; he would
bend to the curve of space-time at last, which leads to the sea in the end. Fate is the path of least action.
And if you never know it is all recurrence then it only means you feel the loss, over and over and over.
But he had loved his life, he knew he had, the bad and the good and he wanted to keep it forever, all of
it, to observe it from some eternal beach and perhaps step back into it, a moment here, a moment there,
looking out a bay window at streetlight, bare branch, falling snow, listening to a snatch of piano by the
coals of a fire, those moments of being when all the past seemed in him and alive, suffusing the moment
and the only moment with a feelingтАФwith every feeling, all at once.