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

"How can you be so sure about what she wasтАФ 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 somethingтАж 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, atтАж"
"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 deadтАФbecause 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."

SomethingтАФthe shadow of a swooping bird, perhapsтАФshuttered the sunlight from his eyes far a
split second.

"You think so much of her," he said, thought-fully. "But it's Cletus Grahame and his textbooks on
the military art he wrote two hundred years agoтАФit's Donal Graeme and the way he brought the
inhabited worlds together, one hundred years agoтАФthat other worlds think of when they use the
word 'Dorsai'."

"We've had Graemes far our next neighbor since Cletus," she replied. "What's thought of them,
they earned. But the first Amanda was here before either of them. She founded our family. She
cleared the out-

laws from these mountains before Cletus came; and when she was ninety-three, she held Foralie
district against Dow deCastries' veteran troops when they invaded, thinking they'd have no
trouble with the children, the women, the sick and the old that were all that were left here, then."

"You mean," Hal said, "that time deCastries tried to take over the Dorsai, at the very end of
Cletus' struggle with him?"

"With him and all the power of Earth behind him, in a time when everyone thought Earth was
more powerful than all the other inhabited worlds combined."

"But wasn't it Cletus who gave directions for the defense of Dorsai, that time?"

"Cletus wasn't here. He left two of his officers, Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer to coordinate the
defense and give the districts a general survey of the strategical and tactical situations involved.
But their job was only a matter of laying out the military physics of the situation, with Cletus'
theories and principles as guidelines. It was up to each district individually after that, to draw up
its own plan for dealing with the invaders. That's what Foralie didтАФknowing it would be under
the gun more than any other district, since Foralie homestead was here, and Cletus would be
expected to return to it as soon as he heard the Dorsai had been invaded."