"Dickson, Gordon R - Childe Cycle 5 - The Spirit of Dorsai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

THE SPIRIT
OF DORSAI
GORDON R.DICKSON

ace books
A Division of Charter Communications inc. A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY
Park Avenue South New York, New York
THE SPIRIT OF DORSAI
Copyright (c) 1979 by Gordon R. Dickson Illustrations copyright (c) 1979 by Fernando Fernandez
A portion of this book was published as "Brothers" in ASTOUNDING: John W. Campbell Memorial Anthology, copyright (c) 1973 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
An ACE Book - Cover art by Enric
First Ace printing: September 1979 First mass market printing: April
Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS
Prologue...
Amanda Morgan...
Interlude...
Brothers...
Epilogue...

PROLOGUE
She was tall, slim, and so blonde as to be almost white-haired. There was an erectness to her body that no man could have possessed without stiffness. As she sat cross-legged, her grey eyes gazing down into the valley on the Dorsai that held Fal Morgan and the surrounding homesteads, her face had the quality of a profile stamped on a silver coin.
"Amanda..." said Hal Mayne, gently.
Lost in her thoughts, she did not hear him; and the moment was so close to perfection that he was reluctant to disturb it. The part of him that was a poet, which had survived the months of being a hunted guerrilla on Harmony and even the sickness and the brutalities of the prison there before his escape, stirred again, watching her. Here, on the roof of a warriors' world, under a clean and cloudless sky in a time when the human race was everywhere submitting to the chains of a new slavery, she wore an armor of sunlight, unconquerable. Beside her, in his much taller, wide-shouldered but gaunt, body, pared thin by privation and suffering, he felt like some great dark bird of earth-bound flesh and bone, bending above an entity of pure spirit.
As he waited, her eyes lost their abstraction. As if they had been separated so far that his voice, speaking her name, had had to stretch across time and space to only now reach her, she turned finally back to him.
"Did you say something?" she asked.
"I was going to say how much you resemble that picture of her-of the first Amanda Morgan," he said. "It could be a picture of you."
She smiled a little.
"Yes," she said, "both the second Amanda to bear the name, and I look very much like her. It happens."
"It's still a strange thing, with only three of you of that name in your family in two hundred years," he said. "Does it just happen she had her picture printed at the same age you are now?" he said.
"No." She shook her head. "It wasn't."
"It wasn't?"
"No. That picture you saw in our hall was made when she was much older than I am now."
He frowned.
"It's true," she said. "We age very slowly, we Morgans-and she was something special."
"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're Dorsai-end-result Dorsai. She lived before people like you were what you are now."
"That's not true," the third Amanda said. "She
was Dorsai before there was a Dorsai world. What she was, was the material out of which our people and our culture here were made."
He shook his head, slowly.
"How can you be so sure about what she was- two hundred standard years ago?"
"How can I?" She looked at him far a moment. "In many ways, I am her."
He watched her.
"A reincarnation?"
"No," she answered. "Not really. But something... more as if time didn't matter. As if it's all the same thing; her, there in the beginning of our world, and I here, at..."
"The end of it," he suggested.
"No." She looked at him steadily with those grey eyes. "The end won't be until the last Dorsai is dead. In fact, not even then. The end will only be when the last human is dead-because what makes us Dorsai is something that's a part of all humans; that part the first Amanda had when she was born, back on Earth."
Something-the shadow of a swooping bird, perhaps-shuttered the sunlight from his eyes far a split second.