Читать книгу Bottom of the Sky - Rodrigo Fresán - Страница 14

Someone once said that behind every science-fiction writer (at least behind the first, the original, science-fiction writers) there was, always, a frustrated scientist.

I am not entirely sure this is true; then there’s Ezra: first a successful scientist, then an agent of classified documents, and—when the future only interested him as a launch pad to a past in need of modification—forever a frustrated science-fiction writer.

Ezra, who—when you disappeared without logical explanation, after the night of the great snowstorm, without even leaving a goodbye note, an amazing story or weird tale or astonishing travel—decided to give it all up in the name of exactitude.

But I’m getting ahead of myself without clarifying the trajectory of this story: where its head is and where its tail—bleeding from so many wounds inflicted by its own fangs—ends.

The Faraways, on the other hand, maintained that behind every physicist and astronomer there lay the inert but not dead—just in suspended animation—body of a storyteller who’d succumbed to the cosmic temptation of calculations and formulas. And yet, beneath all of that, barely hidden, top-secret, the true possibility of a writer waiting to be activated by a nervous password not on the tip of the tongue, but in the tips of the fingers. Someone who, impotent and unable to attain the ecstasy of limitless speculation, ends up settling for—simulating that tentative pride of those who want to believe themselves special—the stainless steel walls of a controlled-climate laboratory.

A code. A combination of numbers and letters. A formula. A heavy metal door that opens like a book onto facilities whose core can only be accessed via the repeated use of successive passwords implanted in the magnetic bands of steel cards that guide you down white corridors watched over by unblinking soldiers and sleepless cameras. The eyes of both rigidly fixed on a pure present, fed by the paranoia that a more evolved and efficient Apocalypse is being invented and set in motion in some other laboratory or in a cave where a special button is being pushed to kick off the end of everything in this world.

And the challenge always lies in knowing who will be first to begin the end.