St. Amy's Tale

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 34.8KB 17 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

ST. AMY'S TALE

By Orson Scott Card

Mother could kill with her hands. Father could fly. These are miracles. But they were not miracles

then. Mother Elouise taught me that there were no miracles then.

I am the child of Wreckers, born while the angel was in them. This is why I am called Saint

Amy, though I perceive nothing in me that should make me holier than any other old woman. Yet

Mother Elouise denied the angel in her, too, and it was no less there.

Sift your fingers through the soil, all you who read my words. Take your spades of iron and

your picks of stone. Dig deep. You will find no ancient works of man hidden there. For the

Wreckers passed through the world, and all the vanity was consumed in fire; all the pride broke in

pieces when it was smitten by God's shining hand.

Elouise leaned on the rim of the computer keyboard. All around her the machinery was alive, the

screens displaying information. Elouise felt nothing but weariness. She was leaning because, for a

moment, she had felt a frightening vertigo. As if the world underneath the airplane had dissolved

and slipped away into a rapidly receding star and she would never be able to land.

True enough, she thought. I'll never be able to land, not in the world I knew.

"Getting sentimental about the old computers?"

Elouise, startled, turned in her chair and faced her husband, Charlie. At that moment the airplane

lurched, but like sailors accustomed to the shifting of the sea, they adjusted unconsciously and did

not notice the imbalance.

"Is it noon already?" she asked.

"It's the mortal equivalent of noon. I'm too tired to fly this thing anymore, and it's a good thing

Bill's at the controls."

"Hungry?"

Charlie shook his head. "But Amy probably is," he said.

"Voyeur," said Elouise.

Charlie liked to watch Elouise nurse their daughter. But despite her accusation, Elouise knew there

was nothing sexual in it. Charlie liked the idea of Elouise being Amy's mother. He liked the way

Amy's sucking resembled the sucking of a calf or a lamb or a puppy. He had said, "It's the best

thing we kept from the

animals. The best thing we didn't throw away."

"Better than sex?" Elouise had asked. And Charlie had only smiled.

Amy was playing with a rag doll in the only large clear space in the airplane, near the exit door.

"Mommy Mommy Mamommy Mommyo," Amy said. The child stood and reached to be picked up.

Then she saw Charlie. "Daddy Addy Addy."

"Hi," Charlie said.

"Hi," Amy answered. "Ha-ee." She had only just learned to close the diphthong, and she

exaggerated it. Amy played with the buttons on Elouise's shirt, trying to undo them.

"Greedy," Elouise said, laughing.

Charlie unbuttoned the shirt for her, and Amy seized on the nipple after only one false grab. She

sucked noisily, tapping her hand gently against Elouise's breast as she ate.

"I'm glad we're so near finished," Elouise said. "She's too old to be nursing now."

"That's right. Throw the little bird out of the nest."

"Go to bed," Elouise said.

Amy recognized the phrase. She pulled away. "La-lo," she said.

"That's right. Daddy's going to sleep," Elouise said.

Elouise watched as Charlie stripped off most of his clothing and lay down on the pad. He smiled

once, then turned over, and was immediately asleep. He was in tune with his body. Elouise knew

that he would awaken in exactly six hours, when it was time for him to take the

controls again.

Amy's sucking was a subtle pleasure now, though it had been agonizing the first few months, and

painful again when Amy's first teeth had come in and she had learned to her delight that by nipping

she could make her mother scream. But better to nurse her than ever have her eat the predigested

pap that was served as food on the airplane. Elouise thought wryly that it was even worse than the

microwaved veal cordon bleu that they used to inflict on commercial passengers. Only eight years

ago. And they had calibrated their fuel so exactly that when they took the last draft of fuel from the

last of their storage tanks, the tank registered empty; they would burn the last of the processed

petroleum, instead of putting it back into the earth. All their caches were gone now, and they would

be at the tender mercies of the world that they themselves had created.

Still, there was work to do; the final work, in the final checks. Elouise held Amy with one arm

while she used her free hand slowly to key in the last program that her role as commander required

her to use. Elouise Private, she typed. Teacher teacher I declare I see someone's underwear, she

typed. On the screen appeared the warning she had put there: "You may think you're lucky finding

this program, but unless you know the magic words, an alarm is going to go off all over this

airplane and you'll be had. No way out of it, sucker. Love, Elouise."

Elouise, of course, knew the magic words. Einstein sucks, she typed. The screen went

blank, and the alarm did not go off.

Malfunction? she queried. "None," answered the computer.

Tamper? she queried, and the computer answered, "None."

Nonreport? she queried, and the computer flashed, "AFscanP7bb55."

Elouise had not really been dozing. But still she was startled, and she lurched forward, disturbing

Amy, who really had fallen asleep. "No no no," said Amy, and Elouise forced herself to be patient;

she soothed her -daughter back to sleep before pursuing whatever it was that her guardian program

had caught. Whatever it was? Oh, she knew what it was. It was treachery. The one thing she had

been sure her group, her airplane would never have. Other groups of Rectifiers-wreckers, they

called themselves, having adopted their enemies' name for them - other groups had had their spies

or their faint hearts, but not Bill or Heather or Ugly-Bugly.

Specify, she typed.

The computer was specific.

Over northern Virginia, as the airplane followed its careful route to find and destroy everything

made of metal, glass, and plastic; somewhere over northern Virginia, the airplanes path bent

slightly to the south, and on the return, at the same place, the airplane's path bent slightly to the

north, so that a strip of northern Virginia two kilometers long and a few dozen meters wide could

contain some nonbiodegradable artifact, hidden from the airplane, and if Elouise had not queried

this program,

she would never have known it.

But she should have known it. When the plane's course bent, alarms should have sounded.

Someone had penetrated the first line of defense. But Bill could not have done that, nor could

Heather, really-they didn't have the sophistication to break up a bubble program. Ugly-Bugly?

She knew it wasn't faithful old Ugly-Bugly. No, not her.

The computer voluntarily flashed, "Override M577b, commandmo4, intwis CtTttT." It was an

apology. Someone aboard ship had found the alarm override program and the overrides for the

alarm overrides. Not my fault, the computer was saying.

Elouise hesitated for a moment. She looked down at her daughter and moved a curl of red hair

away from Amy's eye. Elouise's hand trembled. But she was a woman of ice, yes, all frozen where

compassion made other women warm. She prided herself on that, on having frozen the last warm

places in her-frozen so goddamn rigid that it was only a moment's hesitation. And then she reached

out and asked for the access code used to perform the treachery, asked for the name of the traitor.

The computer was even less compassionate than Elouise. It hesitated not at all.

The computer did not underline; the letters on the screen were no larger than normal. Yet Elouise

felt the words as a shout, and she answered them silently with a scream.

Charles Evan Hardy, b24ag61-richlandWA.

It was Charlie who was the traitor-Charlie, her sweet, soft, hard-bodied husband, Charlie who

secretly was trying to undo the end of the world.

God has destroyed the world before. Once in a flood, when Noah rode it out in the Ark. And once

the tower of the world's pride was destroyed in the confusion of tongues. The other times, if there

were any other times, those times are all forgotten.

The world will probably be destroyed again, unless we repent. And don't think you can hide from

the angels. They start out as ordinary people, and you never know which ones. Suddenly God puts

the power of destruction in their hands, and they destroy. And just as suddenly, when all the

destruction is done, the angel leaves them, and they're ordinary people. Just my mother and my

father.

I can't remember Father Charlie's face. I was too young.

Mother Elouise told me often about Father Charlie. He was born far to the west in a land where

water only comes to the crops in ditches, almost never from the sky. It was a land unblessed by

God. Men lived there, they believed, only by the strength of their own hands. Men made their

ditches and forgot about God and became scientists. Father Charlie became a scientist. He worked

on tiny animals, breaking their heart of hearts and combining it in new ways. Hearts were broken

too often where he worked, and one of the little animals escaped

and killed people until they lay in great heaps like fish in the ship's hold.

But this was not the destruction of the world.

Oh, they were giants in those days, and they forgot the Lord, but when their people lay in piles of

moldering flesh and brittling bone, they remembered they were weak.

Mother Elouise said, "Charlie came weeping." This is how Father Charlie became an angel. He saw

what the giants had done, by thinking they were greater than God. At first he sinned in his grief.

Once he cut his own throat. They put Mother Elouise's blood in him to save his life. This is how

they met: In the forest where he had gone to die privately, Father Charlie woke up from a sleep he

thought would be forever to see a woman lying next to him in the tent and a doctor bending over

them both. When he saw that this woman gave her blood to him whole and unstintingly, he forgot

his wish to die. He loved her forever. Mother Elouise said he loved her right up to the day she

killed him.

When they were finished, they had a sort of ceremony, a sort of party. "A benediction," said Bill,

solemnly sipping at the gin. "Amen and amen."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ST.AMY'STALEByOrsonScottCardMothercouldkillwithherhands.Fathercouldfly.Thesearemiracles.Buttheywerenotmiraclesthen.MotherElouisetaughtmethattherewerenomiraclesthen.IamthechildofWreckers,bornwhiletheangelwasinthem.ThisiswhyIamcalledSaintAmy,thoughIperceivenothinginmethatshouldmakemeholierthananyother...

展开>> 收起<<

St. Amy's Tale.pdf

共17页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

St. Amy's Tale

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: