Hard to Be a God by Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky

Author:Arkady Strugatsky & Boris Strugatsky [Strugatsky, Arkady]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science Fiction, Historical, Fantasy
ISBN: 9781613748282
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Rumata wandered aimlessly through the endless corridors and passages of the palace—dark, dank, and stinking of ammonia and decay. He walked past luxurious rooms decorated with rugs, past dusty studies with barred narrow windows, and past storerooms piled with junk stripped of gilding. There was almost no one here. Only the rare courtier would risk visiting this maze at the back of the palace, where the royal apartments imperceptibly became the offices of the Ministry of the Defense of the Crown. It was easy to get lost here. Everyone remembered the incident in which a patrol of the Guard, walking the perimeter of the palace, had been frightened by the heartrending wails of a man stretching his badly scratched arms through the bars of an embrasure. “Save me!” the man shouted. “I’m a gentleman of the bedchamber! I don’t know how to get out! I haven’t eaten for two days! Get me out of here!” (There was a lively ten-day correspondence between the Minister of Finances and the Minister of the Court, after which they did decide to break down the bars, but for the duration of these ten days the unfortunate gentleman of the bedchamber had been fed with meat and bread passed to him on the end of a pike.) Besides, it wasn’t entirely safe. In these tight corridors, you could meet drunk guardsmen who were protecting the king’s person, and drunk storm troopers who were protecting the ministry. These would fight tooth and nail, and when satisfied would go their separate ways, carrying away the wounded. Finally, the murdered also wandered here. Over two centuries, the palace had accumulated a lot of them.

A storm trooper on sentry duty stepped out from a deep recess in the wall, his ax at the ready. “You may not pass,” he declared sullenly.

“A lot you know, fool!” Rumata said carelessly, pushing him aside.

He heard the storm trooper stomping indecisively behind him and suddenly caught himself thinking that insulting words and careless gestures now came naturally to him, that he was no longer playing the role of a highborn boor but had largely become one. He imagined himself like this on Earth and felt disgusted and ashamed. Why? What has happened to me? Where did it go, my nurtured-since-childhood respect and trust in my own kind, in man—the amazing creature called man? Nothing can help me now, he thought in horror. Because I sincerely hate and despise them. Not pity them, no—only hate and despise. I can justify the stupidity and brutality of the kid I just passed all I want— the social conditions, the appalling upbringing, anything at all—but I now clearly see that he’s my enemy, the enemy of all that I love, the enemy of my friends, the enemy of what I hold most sacred. And I don’t hate him theoretically, as a “typical specimen,” but him as himself, him as an individual. I hate his slobbering mug, the stink of his unwashed body, his blind faith, his animosity toward everything other than sex and booze.

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