"Ian Watson - Early, In The Evening" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

Aware, one certainly was.
Today Father Hopkins has delivered his snowdrop sermon. Tomorrow he was
perfectly free to chose a different theme. For their part, radio and
television might discuss a space-time anomaly, or of the influence of a
cosmic string from the dawn of the universe, or phenomenological
anamnesis.
Tomorrow a riot might erupt in the medieval village or in the modern town.
A rape or a murder might blemish the day. En route to the supermarket in
the retail park a car crash might claim a life. If someone died, they
weren't restored to life the following day. If someone broke a leg, they
wouldn't be walking around for a while.
Even so, one sensed that the day which followed the present day was not
exactly a tomorrow. The next day, and the day after that, lacked futurity.
The stream of time had encountered some barrier which forced chronology
backwards. Richard and Paul, and Elisabeth and Sally, and the kids too,
were farm labourers in the mornings. In the afternoons they were workers
in early industry in the local textile mill -- till it was time for the
kids to go to school, till it was time for Richard to become a local
government officer in charge of planning applications, and for Paul to
become a mortgage broker. Surprisingly, some people were still trying to
move house -- as if thus they might ease their medieval duties or finesse
a finer hovel wherein to awaken in the mornings.
Evenings, as Sally had insisted, were for fun. Some people chose to view
prospective new homes at bargain prices. A number of people made the
effort to drive to the city thirty miles away, to return -- or not, as the
case might be -- before the drowsiness began at around eleven o'clock.
That inevitable drowsiness! As the long day -- the eight hundred year day
-- decayed, preliminary to the crumbling of the present, so did people
begin to slumber, whether they wished to or not. Sleep softly; and wake
hard.
If some scientist in a laboratory had contrived to remain conscious till
past midnight, doped with amphetamines and surrounded by bright lights and
bells and gongs, would he or she perhaps have experienced the onset of
sheer nothingness? In the absence of futurity, what else could she or he
possibly apprehend? Only nullity, vacancy, utter abeyance, absence of all
context.
No news report spoke of any such attempt. In the absence of futurity, news
could hardly electrify an audience. Events could never develop much
forward momentum. Regional wars and politics had stalled. Also, stock
exchange trading. Manufacturing continued. Goods produced during the
industrial revolution regularly mutated into modern merchandise.
Newsworthy disasters still occurred. A flood in Bangladesh. A train crash
in Japan. Oil tankers colliding in the Gulf.
Towards bedtime the night before, Richard had received a crank phone call.
Some woman in town did not devote her evenings to leisure but to
cold-calling at random to confide her own theory about the breakdown of
time. According to the voice on the phone, the cycle of reincarnation had
collapsed due to the increase in world population in the late twentieth
century. The dead could only be reincarnated as themselves at an earlier
stage in their own pre-existence. Everyone who experienced the phenomenon