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

his previous endeavours with other worlds. We, who can sense the energy of his concentration,
realized that the intensity of his observation has quadrupled. Whatever he had been looking for
desultorily among your worlds, he found in Earth. Our agents drove him out once and he
returned. They drove him out a second time; he still hovers near, ready to invade again. We can
only have three direct agents on a planet: we can only house ourselves in three minds. But with
the help of the telepaths, we contacted two moreтАФTel and AlterтАФwho became our indirect
agents for a while. One of our indirect agents, Tel, was killed in the mock war, and so there are
only four people left on Earth who are our contacts. As I said, we can only inhabit three of their
minds at once; this leaves one, already used to contact extra-terrestrials, open for infiltration; this
time we are sure that the Lord of the Flames, on his third return to earth, will choose one of our
own agents, whichever one is left outside our protection. If we let them know directly the results
would be disastrous to their own psyches. Therefore, our contact, already rare, will have to cease
entirely after our next message. A great bird ruffled its golden feathers, blinked a red eye, cocked its
head, and listened. The reason for the Lord of the FlamesтАЩ interest in Toromon is clear. He is making
ready to begin a war in our universe; he is now trying to find out all he can about how a life form
of this universe conducts itself in a war. And this war of Toromon is a pure war, because there is
no real enemy. Well, perhaps we can learn something too. We have the advantage of knowing
where to look, for everyone in this City is so much more akin to each other and to the earth men
than is the Lord of the Flames that ideas such as тАЬintelligenceтАЭ, тАЬcompassionтАЭ, тАЬmurderтАЭ,
тАЬenduranceтАЭ mean nothing to him; he must learn them by alien observation. Similarly, he has
characteristics of which we have no idea. To further our own understanding, we have requested
our agents to bring with them three documents, products by three of the most sensitive minds on
Earth: the Poems of Vol Nonik, the Unification of Random Fields, by Dr Clea Koshar, and Looms of
the Sea, a Final Revision of the History of Toromon, by Dr Rolth Catham.

There was silence in the city, and then a faint life form spoke, a form that existed only as a light-sensitive
virus who saw from the star-wide waves of novas to the micro-micron scattering of nutrinos, a life form
disturbed occasionally by a fragment of ionized hydrogen, a loose photon, the aethric hum of a spinning
galaxy eternities away from its home in cold, inter-galactic space: тАЬWhat will stop them from getting
theseтАж works?тАЭ

Then the Triple Being returned: These works, remember, are by the most sensitive minds of Earth
and will never reach the common man as books or periodicals, and among our four agents, there
will constantly be a traitor, the Lord of the Flames himself.

And a Universe awayтАж



тАж And she was beautiful, beautiful with sun through the cracked window caught in her falling hair,
beautiful with her closed eyes, her olive lids, darker than the rest of her face, the rest of her skin, which
was beautiful with colours like honey and the blush of kharba fruits going from white to pink, before they
become speckled, orange, ripe; beautiful with textures like velvet, like polished, brown stone where her
knee was drawn up and the skin tight; and where her body curved slightly towards him, at her side, and
the skin was looseтАФlike velvet.

The cracked pane in the window made a jagged line of shadow over the floorboards, up the side of the
bed, across the crumpled sheets, a serpent of shadow on her stomach. Her lips were opened and her
bright teeth were faintly blued by the shadow of her upper lip.