"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 - The Spirit of Dorsai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"AmandaтАж" 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 herтАФof 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 MorgansтАФand she was something special."

"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're DorsaiтАФend-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.