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

dangerous. He thinks of completely perverting or destroying a culture to gain his information. We
have tried to drive him out, and to keep the various cultures of the universe intact. On your
several words, as our agents you have all had contact with him. And you have all had brief
contacts with each other. To the fifty-foot eyestalks of one listener the atmosphere of the City was
tinged methane green. He has been gathering information for a full-scale attack, but since we have
dogged him to each planet, we have been able to see the information he gathers. Each of your
cultures was undergoing some serious political and social upheaval when he chose to examine
you. His method of observation in each culture has been to activate the elements that would push
the upheaval a little too fast, would bring it to its conclusion a little too rapidly. Then, oddly, his
point of concentration would be not the workings of the economic or social upheaval itself but
rather an intense study of the personal life of some socially alienated individual, a madman, an
upper echelon political figure, often an outlaw, a dispersed genius at the edge of society. To one
living crystal in the City the words of the Triple Being came as a significant progression of musical
chords. Now we wish to discuss one particular incident of his observation. A sentient cactus shifted
its tentacles and beheld the City almost as it was in reality, a stretch of pastel sand; but, then, who can
say what was the reality of the city. You have all arrived here except our agents from Earth, and we
want to take this opportunity to discuss their specific situation. To a casual observer of the meeting,
the statement that the Earth representatives had not arrived would have seemed a flagrant oversight; one
of the attendants was an attractive, auburn-haired woman with wide hazel eyes. But a minute examination
would have shown her slim almond-nailed fingers, her cream and honey skin to he a bizarre cosmic
coincidence. Internal examination and genetic analysis would prove her a bisexual species of moss.
Self-contained and self-providing, the empire of Toromon has rested on Earth for fifteen hundred
revolutions about the star Sol. The upheaval that Toromon went through was a complexed
economic, political, and psychological reorganization coupled with a tidal wave of technological
advances in farming methods and in food production that the degenerate, thousand-year-tired
aristocracy was unable to redistribute. тАЬTidalwaveтАЭ was the metaphor that a web-footed, triple-lidded
marine creature from a world all water heard; to others it was тАЬearthquakeтАЭ, тАЬsandstormтАЭ, тАЬvolcanoтАЭ.
Their solution was to simulate a situation which existed only in the libraries from the time when
the whole planet was populated with nations like theirs: they simulated a war, a war that would
rid them of their excesses, in energy, in production, in lives. The vestigial skeleton of a military
organization that had survived from before their isolate period (when just such real wars had
completely demolished other nations, leaving Toromon alone) was enlarged to a tremendous
force, armies were recruited, equipment was prepared, and a vast fantastical war was staged near
the radiation-saturated rim of their empire, controlled by an immense random computer situated
in the ruined remains of a second City in their empire called Telphar. Because of the radiation
around them, evolution has run wild in Toromon, and there is one atavistic section of the
population that has regressed to a point that race had passed three million years ago, while
another segment has jumped a million years ahead and become a race of giants with many
telepaths. The telepaths tried to remain above this war, but were at last dragged into it. Our
agents, a telepath among them, convinced themтАФin an effort to find some other solution less
destructive than this mock warтАФto establish a momentary telepathic link among all the
inhabitants of the empire. The fact that the war was not real has come out among the people. The
results have been too violent to predict accurately. The whole structure of Toromon was weak; it
may have crumbled beyond hope already. Outlaw bands of malcontentsтАФor malisтАФroam the
country. There was an attempt to establish a new, young king, and for a while that worked, but
the governmental system had been designed to rule a peaceful, calm nation, not a nation at war.
A strange life-form composed solely of thermal vibrations oscillated pensively in the City, listening,
contemplating. The reason we go into this situation in so much detail is because of the strange
action of the Lord of the Flames when he encountered Toromon. First of all, his attempts to bring
the situation to a rapid termination were immensely more violent and destructive than in any of