"Watson-TheAmberRoom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

IAN WATSON

THE AMBER ROOM

And I saw her fall from the sky.

The failed hang-glider had begun to spin like a sycamore seed. Then the sail
snapped upward at the keel and became a plunging V. At this point she must have
pulled the handle of the parachute. The chute failed to separate from her
harness. Orange nylon blossomed but was trapped.

I saw Amberfall. That was my intimate name for Isabelle because of the tan of
her skin and the beads of her nipples. I watched her plum met to earth.

Afterward I wept for her just as Phaeton's sisters wept for their brother after
he was hurled from the sky because he flew the sun-chariot crawly. But my tears
were only salt water. They didn't harden into amber. Not as yet . . .

I must have been eleven when I first began to dream of flying. In my dreams I
soared above the ripe cornfields of the English West Country underneath a wing.
The wing was smooth, not feathered. I wasn't a bird.

In the sky of my dreams the sun was a golden ball, a rich warm aromatic sphere,
the quintessence of harvest. I believed I had identified the true substance of
that sun when my grandmother, Gran-Annie, showed me a large bead of amber.

The fields beneath me were imprinted with patterns suggestive of runes or
astrological symbols. I honestly can't recall whether "crop circles," so called,
had already begun to appear in genuine fields. A memory isn't like a leaf
perfectly preserved in amber for all time. We don't remember a past even t in
itself, but rather our memory of that event. Subsequently we remember the memory
of a memory. Thus our mind forever updates itself. Essentially memories are
fictions. Each time that we suppose we are remembering, these fictions are being
rewritten within ourselves, with ourselves as heroes or victims.

When my dreams began, crop circles were probably already materializing overnight
in corn fields. Maybe this had been happening on and off for centuries rather
than my dreams being any sort of anticipation of the phenomenon. Later, these
circles became a temporary media sensation.

What wild stories there were in the newspapers! The patterns must be enigmatic
attempts at communication on the part of some alien intelligence! Or possibly
archetypal imagery was being stamped upon patches of plants by some kind of
collective planetary mind. . .

Even to my immature mind I'm sure that speculations of this sort would have
seemed nutty. Surely those convolutions in the crops were none other than the
wind itself made visible. Eddies and swirls and turbulence. Did not the wind