"Samuel R. Delany - The Fall Of The Towers 3 - City Of A Thousand Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

CITY OF A THOUSAND SUNS
by Samuel R. Delany




The Fall Of The Towers 3




CHAPTER I
What is a city?

There is at least one on the planet earth, isolate among deadly seas, alone on an island near a
radiation-pitted continent. Some of the sea and the land at the edge of the continent have been reclaimed:
among these silent tides and still plains there is an empire. It is called Toromon. Its capital city is Toron.

Halfway around the universe, in a dispersed galaxy, is anotherтАж city.

A double sun throws twinned shadows from a tooth of rock jutting in the sand. The gullies sometimes
shift in the rare breeze. The sky is blue, the sand lime white. Low on the horizon are streaks of clouds.
And down the steep side of one powdery dune is theтАж City.

What is the City?

It is a place in the sand where a field of energy keeps the octagonal silicate crystals in perfect order, lined
axis end to axis end. It is a place where a magnetic compass would spin like a top. It is a place where
simple aluminium has the attractive capacity of sensitized alneco. And although, at the moment, it housed
hundreds of inhabitants, there was not a building or structure of any kind in it. The sand was no longer
smooth, and only a microscope could have detected the difference in the crystalline placement.

Responding to the psychic pressures of those who observed it, at times the City seemed a lake, at others
a catacombe of caves. Once it had appeared a geyser of flame, and occasionally it looked like buildings,
towers, looped together with elevated roads, with double light glinting from thousands of sunward
windows. Whatever it was, it stood alone on the white desert of a tiny planet halfway across the universe
from earth.

A meeting was being called in the City now; and with merely a turning of attention, the inhabitants met.
The presiding intelligence was not single, but a triple entity much older than any of the others present. It
had not built the city. But it dwelt there.

We have called you here to help us, it began. Simply by being here you have already contributed
greatly. There are only a few more of you to arrive, but we thought it better to begin now than to
wait. To one group at the meeting, immense, thirty-foot worms, the City seemed a web of muddy tunnels
and the words came as vibrations through their hides. As we have explained before, our universe has
been invaded by a strange, amoral creature whom we have called till now the Lord of the Flames.
So far he has only engaged in scouting activity to find out as much information about life in this
universe as possible. A metallic cyst received the words telepathically; for him the City was an airless,
pitted siding of rock. But even through his methods of experimenting, we know him to be