Under the Green Star
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Green Star Rises #1
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Under the Green Star». Краткое содержание книги:
There was a darkness that was absolute, and a sleep that lasted forever.
And then, after an immeasurable lapse of time I was roused from that slumber which I had thought to be eternal. There was a hand that held a vial to my nostrils, a broken vial that lay in the wet folds of a handkerchief. I inhaled a pungent vapor that stung my nostrils and made me gag and cough.
And blurrily, through dim eyes, I could make out more.
There was a tall man in a long white coat who was bending over me. I could dimly make out his face—serious, thoughtful, a clean-shaven face with keen eyes and dark hair that grew white at the temples.
The shadows were clearing now. I could see beyond the tall man in the white coat who held the crushed vial of pungent chemical to my nostrils. Beyond him there was the plump, motherly figure of a woman who stood with a handkerchief to her face, wiping her eyes.
I seemed to recognize that woman. And beyond her were day-lit windows through which I could just make out green, rolling, wooded hills that also had a haunting familiarity to them.
“He is coming out of it now, I think.”
It was the tall man in the white coat who spoke. The language in which he spoke sounded curious to my ears, but oddly familiar at the same time. My brain was numb and sluggish, my mind dull and clogged as with the dregs of some long nightmare. I struggled to understand what was happening to me.
“Oh, thank God, doctor!”
It was the plump, middle-aged woman who spoke. Her words, too, were at once strange and at the same time familiar, as were her features. It seemed to me that I had known that face and that voice somewhere, sometime, as in another life …
As in another life.
And just like that, it came to me.
I recognized the anxious voice of my housekeeper, and her worried features.
And behind her, beyond the windows, I recognized that landscape of rolling hills. Those were the familiar green hills of Connecticut, and this was my house, and I—I yet lived.
Or lived again!
The doctor turned away, depositing the wet handkerchief and the crushed vial on the night table. Then his strong fingers fumbled at my wrist, seeking a feeble, erratic pulse.
“Will he—live, doctor?” my housekeeper asked anxiously.
He frowned, counting the beats of my heart.
“He lives, but just barely. A good thing you called when you did, ma’am. He would not have lasted very much longer, without medical aid. We must get him into an oxygen tent, and swiftly.”
“But whatever happened! Whatever is it!”
He frowned thoughtfully, pursing his lips.
“I wish I could say! Something quite beyond my experience, I’m afraid. Some sort of trance and coma, but not one induced by drugs or disease or injury, as far as I can tell. But there’s no time to waste in talk. You have a telephone here, of course?”
“In the hall.”
“Good. Let me call the hospital, have them get the intensive care unit ready to receive a patient … I assume there is somebody here—a gardener, a chauffeur—who can help me get him downstairs?”
“Of course. I’ll call Wagner …”
They left me then. There were footsteps in the hall, the sounds of a telephone being dialed. I lay, not moving a muscle, pervaded by a weakness that went beyond the flesh to include the spirit as well. An ironic smile twisted my lips. I would have laughed, had I been able. For I understood in full at last the bitter jest the Gods or the Fates had arranged for me. Yes, it was clear now, all too terribly clear. The death of the body of the Lord Chong had not meant the death of my spirit but merely the extinguishing of my consciousness for a time, during which my far-wandering spirit-self escaped from its borrowed mansion of clay and fled back across the cold, dark gulfs between the stars to the world where my own true body lay empty and waiting to receive it.
In time I recovered my strength again, but there were many days when my spirit clung tenuously to my wasted flesh and only the iron strength of a trained and disciplined will helped me to keep my hold on life.
I had been absent from my body for far too long, you see … far longer than I had expected to be, caught as I was in the swirl of events on a wonderful and alien world far distant from my own, a world that seems to me now but a peculiarly vivid and intensely realistic dream.
During the enforced leisure of my convalescence I have written down this record of my experiences on the World of the Green Star, impelled by an urgency I cannot quite name. Perhaps it is that I wish to remember everything as it was then, lest I forget the awe and beauty, the strangeness and terror, of that experience that must surely be the most weird and marvelous adventure ever lived by a denizen of this planet. This document shall be placed in a sealed vault, to be opened only in the event of my death; if ever curious eyes peruse these pages, I feel certain that this record will be termed nothing more than a work of extravagant fiction.
And now that I have reached the final ending of my story, I am aware of an odd reluctance to terminate it, as if by setting down those fatal words—The End—I am letting go of my adventure, thus permitting it to recede from me into the dim vistas of the past … while I am doomed to live on into the future. While I yet toil on, page after page, my strange adventures and my distant friends are real and very near; but once the manuscript has been finished and set aside, the thing is over and done and ended.
Ere long, they tell me, my strength will have been fully regained. I have dreamed many times of voyaging in spirit-form yet a second time across the dark cosmos to that strange world of eternal mists and towering trees and jewelbox cities. But what is there left for me to return to? I failed to save from the clutches of her mortal enemies the woman I love, who by now has surely suffered death at the hands of her enemies, whether at the hands of the tyrant Akhmim or of the vengeful Siona I cannot know.
Could I endure it, to go back to view the tomb of that dead loveliness? I do not need to venture there, for part of me lies therein as well. My heart is buried in the sepulcher of Niamh the Fair …
Only the other day, browsing through an old, well-loved book, I found a set of verses that might have been set down for my eye alone, so intimately did they speak to my sorrow:
Up front Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate,
And many a Knot unraveled by the Road; But not the Master-knot of Human Fate.
Wise old Omar the Tent-maker! Did he guess somewhat of these matters, dreaming there by moonlight in the rose gardens of his native Persia? Who can say—who can know? For, whether it be by chance or accident or design, that verse plays upon a most peculiar coincidence.
“Up from Earth’s Centre through the Seventh Gate …”
The old Tibetan mystics whose soul-science I employed to unlock the portals of the spirit, to loosen the bonds, to set my astral body free that it might flee this clay and soar aloft to strange and marvelous worlds that lay beyond the moon itself—those sages call by that very name the orifice through which my spirit fled—“the Seventh Gate”!
Through which my spirit fled to a fate stranger and more wonderful than I could ever have dreamed. To a life of glory and heroism and adventure beyond the wildest imaginings of the romancers. And to a love so precious that I feel it yet, in another body, on another world. A love that death cannot sever …
Or is she dead? Lives she yet on that dim world of miracles that lies under the Green Star? Did Niamh make good her escape from the clutches of Siona’s foresters, who would sell her to the envoys of her hated enemy, Akhmim of Ardha? Is she lost and alone, wandering among the sky-tall trees, going every moment in peril, lacking my strong arm? Does she lie at this moment in chains in the dungeons of Akhmim, while her city and her kingdom lay down their swords and open the gates to the cruel hordes of the invader? Or did Siona save her for vengeance alone, to sit smiling while her fair flesh was torn beneath the knives of the torturers? Or did Niamh elude her pursuers, escape the savage predators of the giant trees, and find her way to the safety of her city of Phaolon? Perhaps at this very moment, the hordes of Ardha are locked in battle with the chivalry of Phaolon before the glittering gates of the Jewel City, while Niamh the Fair, armed like a warrior princess, leads her gallant soldiery against the foe … and I am here, here, unable to stand beside her in that last battle, and lend my strength and my sword to the defense of the woman I love and the kingdom that hailed me as its hero and savior!