"Michael Swanwick - Urdumheim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

Urdumheim
by Michael Swanwick

From his home in Philadelphia, Mr. Swanwick reports that he is just
about to leave for a trip to Chengdu in Szechuan Province, China. His
latest story collection, The Dog Said Bow-Wow, is due out this fall and a
new novel, The Dragons of Babel, is due in January. He says that
тАЬUrdumheimтАЭ is a creation myth told by the inhabitants of that new
novelтАФbut donтАЩt expect to find it in the book. Its only publication is here,
in the copy you hold in your hands or on your PDA.

****

Every morning King Nimrod walked to the mountain, climbed its steep sides
to the very top, and sang it higher. At noon ravens brought him bread and
cheese. At dinner time they brought him manna. At sunset he came down.
He had called the granite up from under the ground shortly after
Utnapishtim the Navigator landed the boats there. First Inanna had called
upon her powers to put the rains to sleep. Then Shaleb the Scribe had
picked up a stick and scratched a straight line in the mud, indicating simply:
We are here. Thus did history begin.

But before history existed, before time began, King Nimrod led the
People out of Urdumheim. Across the stunned and empty spaces of the
world they fled, through the plains and over the silent snowy mountains, not
knowing if these places had existed before then or if their need and desire
had pulled them into being. The land was as large as the sky in those days,
and as unpopulated. But in no place could they linger, for always their
enemies were close on their heels, eager to return them to slavery.

So came they at last to the limitless salt marshes that lay between the
land and the distant sea. It was a time of great floods, when the waters
poured endlessly from the heavens and the grass-choked streams were
become mighty rivers and there was no dry ground anywhere to be seen.
They built shallow-drafted reed boats then, well-pitched beneath, and set
across the waters, where no demon could follow. Skimming swiftly over the
drowned lands, they drove into the white rains, seeking refuge. Until at last
they came upon what was then an island barely distinguishable from the
waters. Here they settled, and here they prospered.

They were giants, that first generation, and half the things in the world
were made by them first. Utnapishtim invented boats and navigation.
Shaleb invented writing and record-keeping. Inanna invented weaving and
the arts of lovemaking. Nimrod himself was responsible for bridges,
houses, coins, and stoneworking, as well as cultivation and animal
husbandry and many other things. But greatest of all his inventions was
language. The People could not speak before he taught them how.

I was a boy when the winged lion came. That morning, Ninsun had set
me to work pitting cherries. It was a tedious, fiddling chore, and because