"Michael Swanwick - The Sleep of Reason" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

the sleep of reason
by Michael Swanwick
1. [Plate 43]
The Sleep of Reason Produces Nightmares
Midway in life's journey, a man who might have been Dante or might have been Goya himself (on this the
record is not clear) went astray and found himself alone in a dark wood. Never saw he so drear, so rank,
so arduous a wilderness! Alas for him that he was an artist, and susceptible to such influences. Alas for us
all that he fell asleep!

The No├╢sphere is the ocean of thought within which we all live, dream, make love, and sometimes
aspire. It is purified by reason. It is polluted by war and madness. And, like a river so badly polluted it
catches fire, the No├╢sphere in times of war and madness can be a dangerous thing.

In a time of war and madness, the man who might well have been Goya fell asleep, and his dreams
caught fire. They congealed and took form and entered the physical world. As cats and owls and bats
and less wholesome creatures, winged, furred and fanged, they leaped into the night, and filled the skies
with their keening presence.

One flew off with a child's jacket. Another swooped down and bit a hole in the lord mayor's ear. A third
put on a uniform and led the French armies into Russia.

A thousand ills poured from the dreamer's troubled sleep. The Siege of Leningrad and the Trail of Tears.
Andersonville and total warfare. The Paraguayan War, the Taiping Rebellion, the Bataan Death March.
Pol Pot, Baba Yar, Jack the Ripper. Mercury poisoning, thalidomide babies, mustard gas and trench
warfare. Lynchings. Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black 47. September Eleventh. The Rape of
Nanking, the occupation of Tibet, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Stalin and Beria and
the Soviet Terror and the relocations and the gulags. Krystalnacht, and then the camps: Chelmo,
Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Maidenek тАФ the
names roll by like cattle cars in an endless train. The Jewish Holocaust, the Native American Holocaust,
the Romani Holocaust, the Armenian HolocaustтАж Why go on?

Around the world, men and women of reason do what they can to purify the No├╢sphere. Poets and
writers and artists and philosophers, when they dream, can sometimes see the sleeper. Always they try to
rouse him from his sickly sleep. "Wake up!" they cry. "Wake up, arise, banish your nightmare thoughts!"
While behind them, all the agonized world adds its screams in their support. "Wake up!"

And still the dreamer sleeps.



2. [Plate 2]
Elena's Heart

Not all mad scientists are men. Not all are young. Some are mad old women, disappointed in life and in
love, and determined to wreak their revenge upon the race of Men. Such were Eleanor, Enid, and
Annaprudenzia who, old and brilliant and ugly, decided to build the young woman they all wished they
had been: Beautiful as the dawn in springtime, lusty as a summer afternoon, and cruel as the harshest
winter's night.
The creation of Elena's form and features was but a trifle. Eleanor was a bioengineer and an
accomplished graverobber. Enid was a neurosurgeon, chiefly, but capable of a little plastic surgery on the