"Dan Simmons - The Terror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

aptain Crozier comes up on deck to ямБnd his ship under attack by
celestial ghosts. Above him тАФ above Terror тАФ shimmering folds of
light lunge but then quickly withdraw like the colourful arms of
aggressive but ultimately uncertain spectres. Ectoplasmic skeletal ямБngers extend
toward the ship, open, prepare to grasp, and pull back.
The temperature is тАФ 50 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping fast. Because of
the fog that came through earlier, during the single hour of weak twilight now
passing for their day, the foreshortened masts тАФ the three topmasts,
topgallants, upper rigging, and highest spars have been removed and stored to
cut down on the danger of falling ice and to reduce the chances of the ship
capsizing because of the weight of ice on them тАФ stand now like rudely
pruned and topless trees reямВecting the aurora that dances from one dimly seen
horizon to the other. As Crozier watches, the jagged ice ямБelds around the ship
turn blue, then bleed violet, then glow as green as the hills of his childhood in
northern Ireland. Almost a mile oямА the starboard bow, the gigantic ямВoating ice
mountain that hides TerrorтАЩs sister ship, Erebus, from view seems for a brief,
false moment to radiate colour from within, glowing from its own cold,
internal ямБres.
Pulling up his collar and tilting his head back, out of forty yearsтАЩ habit of
checking the status of masts and rigging, Crozier notices that the stars overhead
burn cold and steady but those near the horizon
 4 || DAN SIMMONS


not only ямВicker but shift when stared at, moving in short spurts to the left, then
to the right, then jiggling up and down. Crozier has seen this before тАФ in the
far south with Ross as well as in these waters on earlier expeditions. A scientist
on that south polar trip, a man who spent the ямБrst winter in the ice there
grinding and polishing lenses for his own telescope, had told Crozier that the
perturbation of the stars was probably due to rapidly shifting refraction in the
cold air lying heavy but uneasy over the ice-covered seas and unseen frozen
landmasses. In other words, over new continents never before seen by the eyes
of man. Or at least, Crozier thinks, in this northern arctic, by the eyes of white
men.
Crozier and his friend and then-commander James Ross had found just such
a previously undiscovered continent тАФ Antarctica тАФ less than ямБve years earlier.
They named the sea, inlets, and landmass after Ross. They named mountains
after their sponsors and friends. They named the two volcanoes they could see
on the horizon after their two ships тАФ these same two ships тАФ calling the
smoking mountains Erebus and Terror. Crozier was surprised they hadnтАЩt
named some major piece of geography after the shipтАЩs cat.
They named nothing after him. There is, on this October winterтАЩs dark-day
evening in 1847, no arctic or antarctic continent, island, bay, inlet, range of
mountains, ice shelf, volcano, or fucking ямВoeberg which bears the name of
Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier.
Crozier doesnтАЩt give the slightest God-damn. Even as he thinks this, he
realizes that heтАЩs a little bit drunk. Well, he thinks, automatically adjusting his
balance to the icy deck now canted twelve degrees to starboard and down eight
degrees by the bow, IтАЩve been drunk more often than not now for three years,
havenтАЩt I? Drunk ever since Sophia. But IтАЩm still a better sailor and captain drunk