"Cordwainer Smith - Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

Virginia stepped up to a lamp-post, struck it lightly with her fist and said, "Feed me." The post should either have opened, serving us a dinner, or else told us where, within the next few hundred yards, food was to be had. It did neither. It did nothing. It must have been broken.
With that, we began to make a game of hitting every single post.
Alpha Ralpha Boulevard had risen about half a kilometer above the surrounding countryside. The wild birds wheeled below us. There was less dust on the pavement, and fewer patches of weeds. The immense road, with no pylons below it, curved like an unsupported ribbon into the clouds.
We wearied of beating posts and there was neither food nor water.
Virginia became fretful: "It won't do any good to go back now. Food is even farther the other way. I do wish you'd brought something."
How should I have thought to carry food? Who ever carries food? Why would they carry it, when it is everywhere? My darling was unreasonable, but she was my darling and I loved her all the more for the sweet imperfections of her temper.
Macht kept tapping pillars, partly to keep out of our fight, and obtained an unexpected result.
At one moment I saw him leaning over to give the pillar of a large lamp the usual hearty but guarded whop-in the next instant he yelped like a dog and was sliding uphill at a high rate of speed. I heard him shout something, but could not make out the words, before he disappeared into the clouds ahead.
Virginia looked at me. "Do you want to go back now? Macht is gone. We can say that I got tired."
"Are you serious?"
"Of course, darling."
I laughed, a little angrily. She had insisted that we come, and now she was ready to turn around and give it up, just to please me.
"Never mind," said I. "It can't be far now. Let's go on."
"Paul. . ." She stood close to me. Her brown eyes were troubled, as though she were trying to see all the way into my mind through my eyes. I thought to her, Do you want to talk this way?
"No," said she, in French. "I want to say things one at a time. Paul; I do want to go to the Abba-dingo. I need to go. It's the biggest need in my life. But at the same time I don't want to go. There is something wrong up there. I would rather have you on the wrong terms than not have you at all. Something could happen."
Edgily, I demanded, "Are you getting this 'fear' that Macht was talking about?"
"Oh, no, Paul, not at all. This feeling isn't exciting. It feels like something broken in a machine-"
"Listen!" I interrupted her.
From far ahead, from within the clouds, there came a sound like an animal wailing. There were words in it. It must have been Macht. I thought I heard "take care." When I sought him with my mind, the distance made circles and I got dizzy.
"Let's follow, darling," said I.
"Yes, Paul," said she, and in her voice there was an unfathomable mixture of happiness, resignation, and despair . . .
Before we moved on, I looked carefully at her. She was my girl. The sky had turned yellow and the lights were not yet on. In the yellow rich sky her brown curls were tinted with gold, her brown eyes approached the black in their irises, her young and fate-haunted face seemed more meaningful than any other human face I had ever seen.
"You are mine," I said.
"Yes, Paul," she answered me and then smiled brightly. "You said it! That is doubly nice."
A bird on the railing looked sharply at us and then left Perhaps he did not approve of human nonsense, so flung himself downward into dark air. I saw him catch himself, far below, and ride lazily on his wings.
'We're not as free as birds, darling," I told Virginia, "but we are freer than people have been for a hundred centuries."
For answer she hugged my arm and smiled at me.
"And now," I added, "to follow Macht. Put your arms around me and hold me tight. I'll try hitting that post. If we don't get dinner we may get a ride."
I felt her take hold tightly and then I struck the post.
Which post? An instant later the posts were sailing by us in a blur. The ground beneath our feet seemed steady, but we were moving at a fast rate. Even in the service underground I had never seen a roadway as fast as this. Virginia's dress was blowing so hard that it made snapping sounds like the snap of fingers. In no time at all we were in the cloud and out of it again.
A new world surrounded us. The clouds lay below and above. Here and there blue sky shone through. We were steady. The ancient engineers must have devised the walkway cleverly. We rode up, up, up without getting dizzy.
Another cloud.
Then things happened so fast that the telling of them takes longer than the event.
Something dark rushed at me from up ahead. A violent blow hit me in the chest. Only much later did I realize that this was Macht's arm trying to grab me before we went over the edge. Then we went into another cloud. Before I could even speak to Virginia a second blow struck me. The pain was terrible. I had never felt anything like that in all my life. For some reason, Virginia had fallen over me and beyond me. She was pulling at my hands.
I tried to tell her to stop pulling me, because it hurt, but I had no breath. Rather than argue, I tried to do what she wanted. I struggled toward her. Only then did I realize that there was nothing below my feet-no bridge, no jetway, nothing.
I was on the edge of the boulevard, the broken edge of the upper side. There was nothing below me except for some looped cables, and, far underneath them, a tiny ribbon which was either a river or a road.
We had jumped blindly across the great gap and I had fallen just far enough to catch the upper edge of the roadway on my chest
It did not matter, the pain.
In a moment the doctor-robot would be there to repair me.
A look at Virginia's face reminded me there was no doctor-robot, no world, no Instrumentality, nothing but wind and pain. She was crying. It took a moment for me to hear what she was saying, "I did it, I did it, darling, are you dead?"
Neither one of us was sure what "dead" meant, because people always went away at their appointed time, but we knew that it meant a cessation of life. I tried to tell her that I was living, but she fluttered over me and kept dragging me farther from the edge of the drop.
I used my hands to push myself into a sitting position.
She knelt beside me and covered my face with kisses.
At last I was able to gasp, "Where's Macht?"
She looked back. "I don't see him."
I tried to look too. Rather than have me struggle, she said, "You stay quiet. I'll look again."
Bravely she walked to the edge of the sheared-oflf boulevard. She looked over toward the lower side of the gap, peering through the clouds which drifted past us as rapidly as smoke sucked by a ventilator. Then she cried out:
"I see him. He looks so funny. Like an insect in the museum. He is crawling across on the cables."
Struggling to my hands and knees, I neared her and looked too. There he was, a dot moving along a thread, with the birds soaring by beneath him. It looked very unsafe. Perhaps he was getting all the "fear" that he needed to keep himself happy. I did not want that "fear," whatever it was. I wanted food, water, and a doctor-robot.
None of these were here.