"Jeff VanderMeer - Ghost in the Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

there, of joining the pioneers. He tells me so little.

I am happy serving Martel. I only wish I could remember.

Now he calls to me. I enter the sitting room.

"Seneshal. Bring wine. Any year will do." His voice is the very shadow of royalty: deep and cultured and
inbred.

The woman laughs as I turn to carry out his command.

"Show me the ghosts, Martel," she says.



I descend to the wine cellar and tell the solimind what Martel could easily have told it himself. A familiar
sight awaits me when I return: the Executioner hacks at Martel with the ethereal butcher's blade he
carries beneath his robes. The woman laughs and laughs, and after a pause laughs again. Martel laughs
too, until laughter spreads and divides the air, cackles sent up into the great spaces trapped by the
sweeping curves, the inverse minarets of the Great Hall.

Martel goads his assailant. After several minutes, the Executioner turns the weapon on himself and, of
course, discovers that he cannot kill himself. As happens every evening, the Executioner's mask
crumbles; he screams silently and weeps, until the solimind whisks him back into the womb of memory.
Sometimes, as this happens I have seen a hint of regret on Martel's face. The face which bears the mark
of a living executioner: the faded scar along the left cheek.

"Do you require further service?"

Martel scowls. "No. Go away. Leave me alone." A wave of his hand. He turns his back to me, talks
softly to the woman, his face close to hers, a hand on her thigh.

The solimind, like a mechanical muse, calls to me with bits and bytes until I must come to it. In the
basement where light never falls, I disintegrate, merge...

And, for an instant, I see everything everywhere in the house -- from every camera, every sensor, my
eyes stare out. Then: sleep, with the Red Queen, the little bald man, the Executioner. Thus resting we
pass the night, with the intimacy of stored memories. There is that one mixed blessing.

I ask myself the question that cannot be answered.

What have I forgotten?



Sunday.

"You are the Resurrection and the Life..."

As every morning, I address the solimind from the basement.