"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 3 - Ninety Trillion Fausts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
He stopped, and she felt his odd sense of loss. He had hated the small parasite that had ruled and ruined much of his life for so long, but, in some weird way, he'd loved her, too.
"What would you do if you had to face down another one -- alone?" she asked him, worried about the idea. "Or me, either."
"If it happens, .give me your mind. Just let go and concentrate on me. It's a chancy sort of thing, since the threat of a merge is always there, but if I can combine our wills and build a mutual block, rather than combining the memories and personalities, we can hold them. The individual demons don't really seem any stronger than a strong telepath; I couldn't withstand a pair, but Grysta and I did."
"They launched an empathic attack at me," she reminded him. "And, come to think of it, when Molly added herself to me, we broke free."
-He stared at her seriously. "What's required is absolute trust. I trusted Grysta because her fate was my fate; you trusted Molly because she was so innocent and basic and certainly no threat. You and I trusting each other to that degree will be far more difficult, but we've got to be willing to do it. Become the Red-Headed Will. Uh -- by the by, I never asked you. You're not Irish, but any chance?"
She shrugged. "I have no idea. Like most people, all I know is that I come from a long line of dirt farmers on Kryion. There was never any attempt to trace the family beyond a few generations, let alone back to pre-empire days."
"Well, my old home is a pre-empire world," he told her.
"Settled almost entirely by a single culture devoted to preserving, some say locking in stone, an ancient culture. Ancient Gaelic was the only legal language, and the only other one taught was Latin, a language dead long before the first Terrans left Mother Terra."
"You've mastered other tongues well," she noted.
"All telepaths are linguists, for the reasons I told you. All you need do is spend a fair amount of time on a world that speaks one language and you'll speak it like a native, no teaching or heavy learning required."
She nodded. "The basic problem with being an empath is that you have very few friends," she told him. "That's also its biggest advantage, though -- you always know who your friends really are." She paused a moment, then reached over and squeezed his hand. "You are my friend, Jimmy. I'll trust you."
He gave her a smile and a wink and squeezed back, but in the back of his mind, where telepaths had the advantage of privacy, he wondered if he was really up to it.
The maze itself was quite large but. not very difficult to navigate; it was clearly more of an ornamental than challenge maze, and the only thing that slowed all of them, other than its sheer size, running as it did for several kilometers, was the idols.
They ran the gamut from huge, bestial, squatting bipeds with bull-like heads, sharks' teeth, and bulging stomachs, to large and somewhat disturbing creatures like no others ever seen, even for people from a galactic quadrant spanning more than four hundred races. The problem wasn't the idols themselves, no matter how comical or disturbing they might appear, but the fact that they were far more than that.
For all the danger and the near certainty that they would not survive to return home, those from cultures who understood what they were seeing to some degree were nonetheless excited by the glimpses they already had been offered. Virtually all ancient religions and many modern ones had idols of gods and demons alike; it appeared an inflexible rule of nature that, after reason came to a people, the sense of something beyond and more powerful than they also developed. Most of the idols in the maze were bizarre and unfamiliar, yet, now and then, there would be one very like a statue one or another of the parties had seen before, somewhere, on some other, distant world.
The Mycohlian Julki, Tobrush, was as taken by the excitement as the more mystical Jimmy McCray.
"We always laugh at the idol worship of primitive cultures," it commented to Josef. "Now, k appears that, like everything else in various mythologies, it has a real basis in fact. We've known of the existence of parallel universes for some time; it's the basis of our interstellar drives. The problem is, while we can use the principles involved, we have no way of perceiving them. When we spent that night in the crystal cave, with those countless crystals resonating, each, perhaps by accident of nature, a tesseract, our minds were somehow able to perceive such a medium. The denizens of that parallel universe, so totally alien to anything, mentally or physically, that we can comprehend, have the same problem in reverse. Somehow, possibly having to do with some sort of geometry, focused through or within the idols, a weak point is established between there and here, a lesser version of what we do to travel between the stars. The idol gives them some sort of shape or form in this world allowing interaction."
"But how could primitive people stumble on such an exact geometry?" Josef wondered, not totally convinced.
"The universal constant is mathematics," Tobrush reminded him. "It's possible, even likely, that only groups who stumble upon the correct geometry embodied within their own idols get any sort of results. Still, we use the parallel principle for space flight. That means, even though we can't and don't perceive it, for some periods we are within that other plane. Those with talents -- telepathy, empathy, and the rest -- are the descendants of spacers and often spacers themselves. Our one night's experience with the pure thing increased our own powers and gave us added talents. Clearly interaction causes change, as if it were some sort of radiation, mutating us to a degree. Among all the races with talents, though, there is a tradition of some weak
form of them well before they went into space or were even technological cultures. Some radiation from the other plane came to those places at some point, and we see only shadows of the result, weakened by thousands of years of breeding."
"But some races have no pre-space tradition of talents at all," he pointed out.
"Exactly. I would love to run a correlation between those who had such a tradition and those who did not with demon legends. I would wager that there is a strong correlation in the two."
Josef saw the pattern Tobrush was weaving now. "Of course! We know now that the demons once traveled all over the place, in the distant past, using the stations -- the giant crystals." He chuckled. "They used to burn people with paranormal powers as witches in many cultures," he noted. "Even though those people were generally ignorant of the evil religions they were accused of being in, there might well be truth to it. And those who succumbed to some degree to the enormous power those other-plane creatures represent, who somehow accommodated it to some degree, became the servants of what were regarded as truly evil religions."
Josef nodded. "It explains a great deal, certainly, but only on the side of raw power."
"Eh?"
"Where are the gods?" he asked. "Where are the ones who battle the forces of evil?"
"Perhaps," Tobrush responded thoughtfully, "they are one and the same thing."
But was it blasphemy? Jimmy McCray wondered. Wasn't the struggle between Heaven and Hell really a civil war over who would set the rules? What had Esau done, that God should hate him before he was even born? It had been God who had wiped out virtually all Terrans on Mother Earth because they were born and raised in a culture whose leaders were corrupt, and who condemned a whole generation to death in the desert because of one man's transgressions.
And Satan was God's most beautiful, most powerful creation, second only to God in powers and abilities, yet Satan rebelled. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, yet Satan had no trouble corrupting them. Did it not follow that, for evil to exist, it had to be present in seed form in the creation? His old teachers who said God was boss and that was that, and who were we to second-guess what we could not even comprehend, were begging the question. Either evil as well as all else came from God, or else everybody, from Satan to us, was the victim of a very cruel game played for divine amusement. Either that, or the gods of one were the devils of another.
But if there was no absolute good, no absolute evil, just raw power and what you did with it, what did anything matter?
It was just such questions that had driven Jimmy McCray out into the galaxy and into the line of work that had brought him to this point. While he'd long ago lost his faith in much of anything, he always had, deep down, a kernel that hoped someday that he'd be proven all wrong. He didn't need something like this, that confirmed his worst fears.
The world, or level, or whatever it was, they were now on seemed an artificial environment; the sky was black, and had a remote, flat, appearance, as if it were being viewed through some cosmic window or viewing screen. Outside of that flatness, it was dark as night, yet the stars that shone through were vast in number and tightly grouped, and there were multicolored gas clouds and spectacular bright areas, suggesting a globular cluster.
And yet, on the ground, the world was bright as a sunny day, although the light source continued to elude them, and there were no shadows to pinpoint its direction. Here and there within the maze were small inserts; some contained ground-level basins through which fresh spring water flowed, suggesting some sort of natural or artificial subterranean irrigation system for the lush vegetation; other inserts had trees bearing sugar-laden fruits of a variety of unknown kinds, all of which had proven edible. You would not die of hunger or thirst within the hedgerows, but you had to avoid the great idols that seemed to be multiplying as they pressed inward.
The outer idols had been basically all power, attempting to snatch or snare without warning; now the entity, or entities, behind them grew more sophisticated, sending forth understandable telepathic comments designed to unnerve or, worse, to get somebody to make a mistake. Molly could not hear them, but she could sense the evil through her empathic abilities. Gun Roh Chin, back with the Mizlaplanians, was oblivious, and, as a result, totally dependent on others in his party for guidance. It frustrated him to be suddenly impotent in this situation, but, while he couldn't see, hear, feel, or in any way sense the entities' presence, they knew he was there, and he was not immune to their power if he got too close.
They tried to shut the comments out, but only Krisha had success, and that of a limited sort, once they were within line of sight of an idol.
To the Mycohlians, they said, <,The Quintara are respected still among the Mycohl; yet the Quintara come from us and serve us. The Princes of the Quintara are but we in fleshly form. If your leaders still venerate us, if your Lords still worship us, why do you hesitate to serve us, who can bring you power beyond your dreams and raise you even above the Lords of the Qaamil?>
To the pair left from the Exchange, they had more specific offers, as befitted the individualistic nature of the society that produced them.
And Jimmy heard,
They tried threats as well as promises.
The Entity certainly knew them; threats of eternal boiling in hot liquid fire, or endless flaying alive, and other threats more to be expected were occasionally used, accompanied by an empathic tone of sheer menace, but it was that threat of being forever alone and defenseless, wandering without end, accompanied by a terribly cold undertone, that struck the real chord in almost all of them and was the one most used with increasingly graphic variations.
Krisha gave as much of a running vocalization of the entities' commentary to the captain as she could, omitting those words and graphic descriptions she could not bring herself to utter. Still, he had no trouble filling in the blanks, probably in some cases worse than the real words came out.
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