"Duane, Diane - Tos - Spock's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

Position yourself in the right place-on the surface
of the moon, say, somewhere near the slow-moving dayline,
or in one of the LS habitats swinging in peaceful
captivity around the world-and you can see it without any
trouble: the old Earth in the new Earth's arms. Some
pccprefer her that way to any other. Not for them the
broad blue cloud-swirled disk, all bright and
safe and easily seen. They want mystery; they
want the Earth's nightly half-bath in the old
dark. She always emerges, but (to these people's relief)
she always dips in again-the blue fire fading away
down through the spectrum, the rainbow of atmosphere's
edge, dawn through the last flash of crimson,
to black.
And when she does, the stars come out. Faithful as the
other, farther stars, in steady constellations, they turn
as the night that holds them turns-the
splatters of spilled-gem light that are
BosWash, Ellay, Greater Peking,
Bolshe-Maskva, Plu'Paris. The great
roadways across continents are bright threads, deli-
cate as if spiders of fire had spun them: here
and there the light is gentled by coming from far underwater, as
in the Shelf cities off the Pacific coasts of
Japan and old North America. At the edge, a
limb of brightness shows, the sunrise inexorably
sliding around the curved edge of things: but the limb is
narrow, the merest shaving of pearl and turquoise
curving against the breadth of night. And for the time being,
night reigns.
In places light shows without man having made
it. When the moon is in the right phase, the polar
icecaps are one wide sheen of palely burning
white; the Rockies and the Himalayas and the Alps
and .andes glow with a firefly fire, faint but
persistent. Sometimes even the Great Wall will show: a
silver hair, twisting, among the silver glint of
rivers . . . and afterward the Moon will slide away and
around in her long dance with the Earth to gaze at the great
diffuse bloom of her own disk's light in
Atlantic or Pacific. Half a month from now
the Moon will swing around at the new, and all
these places, under the sun again, will give their light
back to her, ashen, a breath of silver against the dark
side of the satellite's phase. But for now the
Earth keeps the moonlight and the romance to herself,
slowly turning, shimmering faint and lovely like a
promise made and kept a long time ago. Darkness
scattered with diamonds, and the darkness never whole:
there she lies, and turns in her sleep ....