"David Zindell - Shanidar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

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Shanidar
a novelette
by David Zindell

I have heard the eschatologists deny the future of our kind. Man, they say, is a bridge between
ape and superman, a rusty old bridge that we can neither preserve nor restore, any more than we
can stop the stars beyond the Vild from exploding or turn the snows of deep winter into rain. For
man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings. The story I tell here is a story of restoration
and resurrection, of how the philosophers of this doomed city were both right and wrong, a story,
if you will, of endings and beginnings which sometimes are, as old men such as I well know, one
and the same thing.

For me, the end of civilization came on the seventieth night of my fiftieth--or was it fifty-
first?--deep winter in this City of Pain. Icefall, some called it, or Unreal City, city of lights
and mists, the topological and, some say, spiritual center of a thousand decaying worlds. The
eschatologists called it Neverness, which means, I think, "Last City" or "Lost City." I prefer the
latter name, though it isn't names that matter. What matters is ice and snow and cold so deep that
your breath shatters into ice crystals on the hard air, and flesh -- should any man be foolish
enough to let the air of this forsaken city touch his naked flesh -- flesh turns to stone as you
watch. What matters is men who deny the importance of flesh, men who seek new beginnings.

He came into my cutting shop on a quiet night when the air was black and still, the only sound the
far-off hissing and humming of the machines as they hovered over the city streets, melting and
smoothing the ice for the following day. He was a pale young man with brown, lively eyes beneath
the white hood of his parka, and he wore a beard so dense and black that you would have thought
him born on Gehenna or Sheydveg and not, as he claimed, on Summerworld where the men are nearly
hairless and their skin is as dark as coffee. With his heavy brows and large, muscular face he
nearly had the look of the Alaloi which had been the fashion -- you will presently understand why -
- some twenty years ago. As he stood there in the stone hallway knocking the slush from his
skates, he explained that he had need of my services. "You are Rainer, the cutter?" he asked me in
a low, conspiratorial voice. I told him that was what the people of the city called me. "I want
you to use all your skills," he said. "I want to become an Alaloi."

I led him into my tearoom where he ejected the blades from his skates and flopped his dripping
mittens on top of the marble table which I had imported from Urradeth at great cost. And though I
didn't feel much like playing the host -- my white tunic was spattered with blood and brains and I
had matters to attend to -- I offered him kvass or coffee and was surprised that he chose coffee.

"Kvass fogs the brain," he said, ignoring the frescoes on the stone walls around him and staring
me in the eyes. "Drink makes men forget their purpose."

I sent for the domestic and I asked the young man, "And your purpose is to look like an Alaloi?"

He shook his head. "My purpose is to become an Alaloi. Completely."

I laughed and I said, "You know I can't do that; you know the law. I can change your flesh as you
please but -- "