（外文电子版资料）Charles L. Grant - The Rest Is Silence.pdf

VERSION 1.0 dtd 032900 C. L. GRANT The Rest Is Silence C. L. Grant is executive secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Like all SFWAs officers, he also is a working science fiction writer. He lives in New Jersey, has a bachelors degree in history, a wife, two years of service in Vietnam, a teaching position in high school (until recently), and has sold twenty-three science fiction stories in addition to the following novelette, a story that suggests (like Tom Reamys Twills) that more goes on in high school than any of us remember. Beware of dreamers: that would be my epitaph if I could have a grave to go to when 1 die. But all there is now is a rambling, shrinking house, and a fog that wisps away my words as I speak. 1 have committed suicide (unaware) and have been murdered for it (all too aware); but if I have to shift the unbearable blame for this madness elsewhere, it has to go to Julius Caesar, late of Rome and the Elizabethan state. After all, if he hadnt gotten himself so famously killed, Shakespeare would have never written a play about it nor would I have had to teach it. Yet he did, and 1 did, so here we are. And now I know all too well just where that is. After the fact, events have a diabolical way of falling into place that makes a curse of hindsight and hell for the present. Case in point: a Wednesday in October and a perfectly ordinary English Department meeting. Chandler Jolliet, the commandingly tall chairman, was quietly and efficiently razoring our confidence in our collective abilities. Apparently a virgin member of our troupe had decided not to concentrate on Julius Caesars examination of power, but rather on the in-depth characterization of the conspirators, Brutus in particular. God forbid that we should deviate from the chartered lanes of the courses of study, but this youngster, fresh from college with stars in his eyes, had taken it upon himself to do just that, and we were all suffering for it. Jo