"Gene Wolfe - Long Sun 1 - Nightside the long sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

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Chapter I

THE MANTEION ON SUN STREET

Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that.
When he talked about it afterward, whispering to himself in the silent hours of the night as was
his custom--and once when he told Maytera Marble, who was also Maytera Rose--he said that it was as
though someone who had always been behind him and standing (as it were) at both his shoulders had,
after so many years of pregnant silence, begun to whisper into both his ears. The bigger boys had
scored again, Patera Silk recalled, and Horn was reaching for an easy catch when those voices
began and all that had been hidden was displayed.

Few of these hidden things made sense, nor did they wait upon one another. He, young Patera Silk
(that absurd clockwork figure), watched outside a clockwork show whose works had stopped--tall Horn
reaching for the ball, his flashing grin frozen in forever.

--dead Patera Pike mumbling prayers as he slit the throat of a speckled rabbit he himself had
bought.

--a dead woman in an alley off Silver Street, and the people of the quarter.

--lights beneath everyone's feet, like cities low in the

Io Gene Wolfe

NlGHTSIDE THE LONG SuN

II

night sky. (And, oh, the rabbit's warm blood drenching Patera Pike's cold hands.)

--proud houses on the Palatine.

--Maytera Marble playing with die girls, and Maytera Mint wishing she dared. (Old Maytera Rose
praying alone, praying to Scalding Scylla in her palace under Lake Limna.)

--Feather falling, not so lightly as his name implied, shoved aside by Horn, not yet quite prone on
the crumbling shiprock blocks, though shiprock was supposed to last until the end of the whorl.

--Viron and the lake, crops withering in the fields, the dying fig and the open, empty sky. All
diis and much else besides, lovely and appalling, blood red and living green, yellow, blue, white,
and velvet black, with minglings of other colors and of colors he had never known.

Yet all these were as nodiing. It was the voices that mattered, only the paired voices (though
there were more, he felt sure, if only he had ears for them) and all the rest an empty show, shown
to him so that he might know it for what it was, spread for him so that he might know how precious
it was, though its shining clockwork had gone some trifle awry and must be set right by him; for
this he had been born.