Star of Gypsies
- Автор: Силверберг Роберт
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Star of Gypsies». Краткое содержание книги:
Nabomba Zom is a world that lends itself to magnificence. I have never seen any place more beautiful except for Xamur the matchless, which no world could surpass. But Nabomba Zom comes close. There is the amazing scarlet sea, which at sunrise reverberates as though struck by a hammer when the first blue rays of morning fall upon it. There are the pale green mountains soft as velvet that run down the spine of the great central continent, and the chain of lakes known as the Hundred Eyes, black as onyx and just as glistening, that lies east of them. The Viper Rift, that serpentine chasm five thousand kilometers long, whose walls shine like gold as they descend an unmeasurable distance to the fiery river in its remote depths. The Fountain of Wine, where invisible creatures carry out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin and a geyser sprays their delightful product into the air every hour. The Wall of Flame-the Dancing Hills-the Web of Jewels -the Great Sickle. And all the fertile fields, from which every manner of crop pours forth. There is no world more bountiful. Even the dung of the giant snails, as I had already had occasion to discover, was of no little value.
Of course I didn't spend all my time touring this planet of wonders in Loiza la Vakako's air-car. There was the rest of my education to consider. I could read and write, more or less, but that was all the formal learning that I had arrived with. Loiza la Vakako had reasons -sound ones, as I would discover-for wanting me frequently to travel by his side as he carried out his official functions, but he also brought in tutors for me at the palace and he required me to take them seriously. Which I did; I have many appetites, and one of them is for knowledge. There is more to life than belching. I applied myself to my studies with zeal and dedication.
And then there was Malilini.
I didn't know what to make of her. She moved through the palace like a sprite, a goddess, a ghost-like anything but an ordinary mortal. I don't think I spoke six words to her, or she to me, in the first three years I lived there. But often I saw her watching me-she had her father's sly eyes-covertly from a distance, or simply staring frankly at me when we were in the same room.
She terrified me. Her beauty, her grace, her strangeness. I knew that she had come ghosting to visit me on Megalo Kastro-staring at me then too, never saying a word-and that she had watched over me as I lay adrift in that warm quivering sea into which the guild's man had thrown me. Why? Why, when they had summoned me from my dungshoveling duties, had she said "Yakoub. At last," at our first true meeting? art of my character; but I didn't dare ask. Shyness has never been in this one instance I was afraid to seek explanations, for fear I would shatter some fragile spell that was binding the two of us together. I told myself that in time I would know. Until then, wait. So I waited. I grew tall and broad and strong, and I let a mustache grow so that when I looked in the mirror I began to see myself with my father's face, and I learned languages and astronomy and history and many other things, and at dawn I would ride across the plateau behind the palace on the supple six-legged Iriarte horse that Loiza la Vakako had given me for my last birthday. Sometimes I would see her far away, glowing in the blue sunrise, riding an even swifter horse. Though I grew daily deeper into manhood, she never seemed to change: always a girl at the edge of woman's estate, radiant, without flaw.
Sometimes it wasn't Malilini that I saw, but Malilini's ghost. I saw her aura. And her ghostly smile, flickering only a moment out of that aura before she vanished, could set me ablaze with strange and troublesome emotion.
In those days I understood very little about ghosting, nor was there anyone I could turn to for information: it has never been something that we discuss easily even among ourselves, let alone care to set down in books. I had known since my days on Megalo Kastro that it is somehow possible for certain people to split their spirits loose from their bodies and go roaming around in far places, apparently invisible to most people but capable of making themselves seen-in a strange not-entirely-there way-whenever and to whomever they chose. These ghosts had an aura, an electrical crackling about them.
I realized now that one of the ghosts that had visited me on Megalo Kastro was Malilini's. And-now that I was beginning to wear my adult face-1 became aware that one ghost, the one with the long mustache and the great roaring laugh, was very likely my own. Even now I saw him from time to time. Hovering for a flashing instant in the air in front of me, winking, grinning, amiably slapping my cheek in a lusty greeting.
If that man was me, I reasoned, then I must be capable of going ghosting. But how was it done? How? How?
Sometimes I would sit by myself for hours at a time on a great throne-shaped green rock at the edge of the scarlet sea and try to do it. I imagined myself driving a wedge down the side of my brain the way a stonemason would split a block of marble with a chisel, and spalling off a part of my soul that would be free to go floating to other worlds, other times. It never worked. I gave myself monumental headaches, as though someone really was hammering at my brain with a mason's wedge, but nothing else ever happened.
And then one day I found Malilini suddenly sitting beside me on that great green throne. I hadn't noticed her approaching at all.
"You'd like to know how to do it, wouldn't you?" "What?"
"Ghosting. That's what you're trying to do. I know."
My cheeks flamed. My eyes would not meet hers. "What makes you think so?"
"Yakoub, Yakoub-"
"I'm simply trying to review my quadratic equations."
Her hand came to rest on mine. Her fragrance dizzied me. "Let me show you how," she said.
THE FIRST TIME YOU GO GHOSTING IS THE MOST FRIGHTENING experience you will ever have in your life. I think even dying must be a trifle, compared with that.
Your soul breaks in half. Part of you drops like a leaden turd to the ground and the other part bursts free, soaring up wildly, a starship out of control making random leaps across the cosmos. But it isn't just the cosmos you're traveling through. It's the river of time. That river flows from past to future, and you are heading upstream.
You see everything that ever was in all of time and space and none of it makes any sense to you. Whatever you see you are seeing for the first time. A chair explains itself to you, or a flower, or a fish, and you are incapable of understanding. You walk down a highway and you are not sure whether you are going east or west, until you realize that you are going in both directions at once. You are lost beyond hope. You choke on your own bewilderment. You wish you could cry but you have no idea what crying is like, or wishing.
A primeval terror takes hold of you, a fear that shakes you like a hundred earthquakes at once.
People you have never seen before smile at you and greet you-or are they saying goodbye? You take five steps up the hill and discover that you are descending. There are no landmarks. The world is water. The horizon bends. The stars fall like rain and make hot golden splashes all around you. You hear the sound of weeping; you hear laughter; you hear nothing. Silence tolls like a great bell. The world is a whirlpool. You begin to drown. Some creature is lodged in your throat. Your eyes are spinning in your head. That primeval terror intensifies and now you begin to understand what it is. It comes from the heart of the universe. The fear that you feel is the force that binds the atoms of the universe together. It is the fundamental substance. What makes all those particles cling to one another is terror: the dread of chaos. Of loneliness. Of loss. And with that understanding the fear begins to ebb. All bonds are loosened and it does not matter. You can learn to love chaos. Everything is streaming away from the center and all is well.