"Ian Watson - Slow Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

why should a God want to be feared? Unless God was insane, in which
case the birds might well come from Him.
They were something irrational, something from elsewhere, something
which couldn't be understood by their victims any more than an ant
colony understood the gardener's boot, exposing the white eggs to the sun
and the sparrows.
Maybe something had entered the seas from elsewhere the previous
century, something that didn't like land dwellers. Any of them. People or
sheep, birds or worms or plants ... It didn't seem likely. Salt water would
rust steel, but for the first time in his life Jason thought about it intently.
"Bird, what are you? Why are you here?" Why, he thought, is anything
here? Why is there a world and sky and stars? Why shouldn't there simply
be nothing for ever and ever?
Perhaps that was the nature of death: nothing for ever and ever. And
one's life was like a slow bird. Appearing then vanishing, with nothing
before and nothing after.
An immeasurable period of time later, dawn began to streak the sky
behind him, washing it from black to grey. The greyness advanced slowly
overhead as thick clouds filtered the light of the rising but hidden sun.
Soon there was enough illumination to see clear all around. It must be five
o'clock. Or six. But the grey glass remained blankly empty.
Who am I? wondered Jason, calm and still. Why am I conscious of a
world? Why do people have minds, and think thoughts? For the first time
in his life he felt that he was really thinkingтАФand thinking had no
outcome. It led nowhere.
He was, he realized, preparing himself to die. Just as all the land would
die, piece by piece, fused into glass. Then no one would think thoughts any
more, so that it wouldn't matter if a certain Jason Babbidge had ceased
thinking at half past six one morning late in May. After all, the same thing
happened every night when you went to sleep, didn't it? You stopped
thinking. Perhaps everything would be purer and cleaner afterwards. Less
untidy, less fretful: a pure ball of glass. In fact, not fretful at all, even if all
the stars in the sky crashed into each other, even if the earth was
swallowed by the sun. Silence, forever: once there was no one about to
hear.
Maybe this was the message of the slow birds. Yet people only carved
their initials upon them. And hearts. And the names of places which had
been vitrified in a flash; or else which were going to be.
I'm becoming a philosopher, thought Jason in wonder.
He must have shifted into some hyperconscious state of mind, full of
lucid clarity, though without immediate awareness of his surroundings,
for he was not fully aware that help had arrived until the cord binding his
ankles was cut and his right foot thrust up abruptly, toppling him off the
other side of the bird into waiting arms.
Sam Patridge, Ned Darrow, Frank Yardley, and Uncle John, and Brian
Sefton from the sawmillтАФwho ducked under the bird brandishing a knife,
and cut the other cord to free his wrists.
They retreated quickly from the bird, pulling Jason with them. He
resisted feebly. He stretched an arm towards the bird.
"It's all right, lad," Uncle John soothed him.