Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World
- Автор: Мосли Уолтер
- Год: 2001
- Язык: английский
- Год: Aspect / Warner Books
- ISBN: 978-0-446-52954-9
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World». Краткое содержание книги:
“You go on,” he said, thinking that her mother would be angry at him for walking with her.
“But I can’t go swimming by myself. I’ll get in trouble.”
“Isn’t your mother up there?”
A frown knitted itself in the young face. Tracie concentrated on the words Leon spoke. He imagined them running through her mind again and again: Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’t your mother up there? Isn’tyourmotherupthere. Isntyourmotherupthere, until it was just a fast jumble of meaningless sounds.
“Talking to Bill,” Leon added.
“Yeah.” Tracie grinned widely and jumped off the bench. “You wanna go swimmin’, mister?”
“No,” he said. “You go on.”
The gurgling cry of her mother’s call came just after Tracie rounded the bend.
3
Pell Lightner was waiting on the marble bench that sat out in front of the Schomburg Residence Hotel. Professor Jones felt as if he had been caught committing some crime. Indeed, he had been wondering on his walk home if Tracie’s mother would allow her to come visit, that if he screwed up the courage to go up that path he could introduce himself and maybe become a friend of the family. He loved the child.
“Good afternoon, Leon,” the short chocolate brown young man said.
“Pell.” Leon walked past the bench and up the granite stairway. Maybe he hoped that Pell was just stopping to rest, that he was up from D.C. on business and had stopped to sit after visiting some of his White Noise friends at the Common Ground below One thirty-fifth Street. But Pell jumped up and accompanied the professor as if he had been invited.
And how could Jones turn him away? He was Fera’s full-time live-in boyfriend, had been her boxing manager — after Leon had succumbed to the symptoms of Pulse use — and was now her valued congressional aide. Pell was a savvy kid born of Backgrounder parents. He had no education except what he had gleaned from public computer links and by overhearing others talk about the news. He couldn’t read, but the advancement in reading computers meant that he had heard many of the classic novels, and he preferred listening to the East Coast Times to getting news from the vid. When Fera picked him up he latched onto her like a barnacle, Professor Jones said for the first few months. But the young man showed his worth when he steered Fera through the Konkon fight, a fight she would have surely lost if not for Pell’s psychological motivation.
“How have you been, Leon?” Pell asked in the small two man elevator.
“Slow.”
“Fera said that you’ve been taking long walks.”
The elevator doors slid open on eight.
Mrs. McAndrews was sitting on her rocker in the hallway, munching her gums. The elderly Korean woman had married Sergeant Steven McAndrews in 1955 at the age of sixteen. Now, at one hundred nineteen, she’d been alone in Harlem since the nineteen eighties. Her husband and son both dead, her family back home forgotten, or forsaken — Leon was never sure which.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. McAndrews.”
“Mr. Jones,” she replied, surprisingly lucid considering her obsessive munching. “This your son?”
“No. My daughter’s boyfriend.”
“You a boxer too, boy?” She spoke with a slight Korean accent.
“No, ma’am. I’m a congressional aide.”
Inside the rooms Jones offered Pell tea or gin.
“It’s all I got. The gin is good. The tea’s good for you.”
“No thanks. You been drinkin’ a lotta gin?” Pell asked, almost nonchalant.
“Fera’s worried, huh?” Leon said. He sat down in the reclining bamboo chair that his first wife had bought when they were just married.
Pell lit on an emerald hassock that came from Amherst with Leon and his second wife, Fera’s mother, Nosa.
“Yes she is, sir,” Pell admitted. He wore a soft gray andro-suit that was open at the collar, revealing a pendant of twigs bound together in the form of a falling man. “She said that your mind was wandering, that you were talking to children you didn’t know in the park. She called Dr. Bel-Nan. He assured her that it’s all a part of the healing process. Me coming up here is just to keep Fera from worrying. You know she’s drafted her first bilclass="underline" the Chromosome Pattern Security Act. If it’s passed it will be the first law enacted that will encompass the planetary colonies.”
“You speak so well, Pell.” Leon said. “I remember when ‘nig’ and ‘motherfuckin’ chuckhead’ were in almost every sentence you spoke.”
Pell had a wide face and an equally broad grin. His eyes lit up and the corners of his mouth raised to form the shallow bowl of his delight.
“It’s only senators that can talk like that in Washington, sir.”
“But do you understand what you’re saying?” Leon asked.
“What?” Pell’s confusion showed.
“I mean, you can’t read, can you?”
The wary look of Common Ground came suddenly into the well-spoken young man’s eyes.
“I read. I’ve read the Declaration of Independence, Moby Dick—”
“Without your phono implant?”
Pell tensed for a moment and then let go. He smiled and asked, “What’s the problem, Professor? Why rag on me?”
“Did you know that Homer was an illiterate?”
The question got Pell’s attention.
“Yeah,” Leon continued. “In his time there was no written language, at least not for everyday people like Greek storytellers. A good one like Homer could remember, word for word, a dozen or more epic poems. Poems much longer than most novels you hear today. And he would really act out each part. Deep voice for Zeus and twittery little words for children and animals.
“In Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury has his ideal community double as a library. Each member commits an important text to memory. It’s called the oral tradition, Pell. Your generation is returning to that. Just like Bradbury’s fireman. Only he still wanted to read.”
“That’s very interesting, Leon—” Pell began. He was going to continue but the professor cut him off.
“So you can see what’s in the cards. The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt. And this transition will not take thousands of years, merely decades. Five years without electricity and all of civilization could fall back into barbarism.”
Leon laughed and sat back. It had been years since he befuddled students with his intellectual constructions. Pell was a bright kid, but, the professor thought, he knew nothing and had no idea of the depth of his ignorance.
“So,” Pell paused, making much of his deliberation. “What you’re saying is that you aren’t going senile and Fera can stop worrying about you.”
“That’s one thing,” Leon said, nodding sagely. “Another is that we teeter precariously upon the edge of the precipice.”
It was Pell’s turn to laugh.
“You laugh?”
“I been teeterin’ ever since the first time I was gang raped on the IRT at three in the mornin’.” Pell tapped the branch talisman. “Barbarism done been here, Professor. You could put the rent on that.”
As was often the case, Pell had the last word. That night Leon Jones mulled over and over the crimes committed upon the young man. He’d never heard of the rape. He doubted if Fera knew.
That he survived, Leon wrote in his journal, is a feat greater than all my years of education and Fera’s heavyweight belts rolled up into one.