"Gene Wolfe - The Ziggurat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

THE ZIGGURAT
by GENE WOLFE




[VERSION 1.1 (Dec 08 03). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update
the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]


First published in Full Spectrum 5, edited by Jennifer Hersh, Tom Dupree and Janna
Silverstein, 1995.




It had begun to snow about one-thirty. Emery Bainbridge stood on the front porch
to watch it before going back into the cabin to record it in his journal.


13:38 Snowing hard, quiet as owl feathers. Radio says stay off the roads unless
you have four-wheel. Probably means no Brook.


He put down the lipstick-red ballpoint and stared at it. With this pen... He ought to
scratch out Brook and write Jan over it.
"To hell with that." His harsh voice seemed loud in the silent cabin. "What I wrote,
I wrote. Quod scripsi whatever it is."
That was what being out here alone did, he told himself. You were supposed to
rest up. You were supposed to calm down. Instead you started talking to yourself.
"Like some nut," he added aloud.
Jan would come, bringing Brook. And Aileen and Alayna. Aileen and Alayna were
as much his children as Brook was, he told himself firmly. "For the time being."
If Jan could not come tomorrow, she would come later when the county had
cleared the back roads. And it was more than possible that she would come, or try to,
tomorrow as she had planned. There was that kind of a streak in Jan, not exactly
stubbornness and not exactly resolution, but a sort of willful determination to believe
whatever she wanted; thus she believed he would sign her papers, and thus she would
believe that the big Lincoln he had bought her could go anywhere a Jeep could.
Brook would be all for it, of course. At nine, Brook had tried to cross the Atlantic
on a Styrofoam dinosaur, paddling out farther and farther until at last a lifeguard had
launched her little catamaran and brought him back, letting the dinosaur float out to
sea.
That was what was happening everywhere, Emery thought -- boys and men were
being brought back to shore by women, though for thousands of years their daring
had permitted humanity to survive.
He pulled on his red-plaid double mackinaw and his warmest cap, and carried a
chair out onto the porch to watch the snow.
Suddenly it wasn't... He had forgotten the word that he had used before. It wasn't
whatever men had. It was something women had, or they thought it was. Possibly it