"Farmer, Philip Jose - Riverworld 1 - To Your Scattered Bodies Go" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

God was standing over him as he lay on the grass by the waters and the weeping willows. He lay wide-eyed and as weak as a baby just born. God was poking him in the ribs with the end of an iron cane. God was a tall man of middle age. He had a long black forked beard, and He was wearing the Sunday best of an English gentleman of the 53rd year of Queen Victoria's reign.

`You're late,' God said. `Long past due for the payment of your debt, you know.' 'What debt?' Richard Francis Burton said. He passed his fingertips over his ribs to make sure that all were still there.

'You owe me for the flesh,' replied God, poking him again with the cane. `Not to mention the spirit. You owe for the flesh and the spirit, which are one and the same thing.' Burton struggled to get up onto his feet. Nobody, not every God, was going to punch Richard Burton in the ribs and get army without a battle.

God, ignoring the futile efforts, pulled a large gold watch from His vest pocket, unsnapped its heavy enscrolled gold lid, looked at the hands, and said, `Long past due.' God held out His other hand, its palm turned up.

`Pay up, sir. Otherwise, I'll be forced to foreclose.'

`Foreclose on what? Darkness fell. God began to dissolve into the darkness. It was then that Burton saw that God resembled himself. He had the carne black straight hair, the same Arabic face with the dark stabbing eyes, high cheekbones, heavy lips, and the thrust-out, reply cleft chin. The same long deep scars, witnesses of the Somali javelin which pierced his jaws in that fight at Berbers, were on His cheeks. His hands and feet were small, contrasting with His broad shoulders and massive chest, and he had the long thick moustachios and the long forked beard that had caused the Bedouin to name Burton `the Father of Moustachios.' `You look like the Devil,' Burton said, but God had become just another shadow in the darkness.

3

Burton was still sleeping, but he was so close to the surface of consciousness that he was aware that he had been dreaming. Light was replacing the night.

Then his eyes did open. And he did not know where he was. . A blue sky was above. A gentle breeze flowed over his naked body His hairless head and his back and legs and the palms of his hands wets against grass. He turned his head to the right - end saw a plain covered with very short, very green, very thick grass. The plain sloped gently upward for a mile. Beyond the plain was a range of hills that started out mildly, then became steeper and higher and very irregular in shape as they climbed toward the mountains. The hills seemed to run for about two and a half miles. All were covered with trees, some of which blazed with starlets, azures, bright greens, flaming yellows, and deep pinks. The mountains beyond the hills rose suddenly, perperpendicularly, and unbelievably high. They were black and bluish-green, looking like a glassy igneous rock with huge splotches of lichen covering at least a quarter of the surface.

Between him and the hills were many human bodies. The closest one, only a few feet away, was that of the white woman who had been below him in that vertical row.

He wanted to rise up, but he was sluggish and numb. All he could do for the moment, and that required a strong effort, was to turn his head to the left. There were more naked bodies there on a plain that sloped down to a river perhaps 10 yards away. The river was about a mile wide, and on its other side was another plain, probably about a mile broad and sloping upward to foothills covered with more of the trees and then the towering precipitous black and bluish-green mountains. That was the east, he thought frozenly. The sun had just risen over the top of the mountain there.

Almost by the river's edge was a strange structure. It was a gray red-flecked granite and was shaped like a mushroom. Its broad base could not be more than five feet high, and the mushroom top had a diameter of about fifty feet.

He managed to rise far enough to support himself on one elbow.

There were more mushroom-shaped granites along both sides, of the river.

Everywhere on the plain were unclothed bald-headed human beings, spaced about six feet apart. Most were still on their backs and gazing into the sky. Others were beginning to stir, to look around, or even sitting up.

He sat up also and felt his head and face with both hands. They were smooth.

His body, was not that wrinkled, ridged, bumpy, withered body of the sixty-nine-year-old which had lain on his deathbed. It was the smooth-skinned and powerfully muscled body he had when he was twenty-five years old. The same body he had when he was floating between those rods in that dream. Dream? It had seemed too vivid to be a dream. It was not a dream.

Around his wrist was a thin band of transparent material. It was connected to a six-inch-long strap of the same material. The other end was clenched about a metallic arc, the handle of a grayish metal cylinder with a closed cover.

Idly, not concentrating because his mind was too sluggish, he lifted the cylinder. It weighed less than a pound, so it could not be of iron even if it was hollow. Its diameter was a foot and a half and it was over two and a half feet tall.

Everyone had a similar object strapped to his wrist.

Unsteadily, his heart beginning to pick up speed as his senses became unnumbered, he got to his feet.

Others were rising, too. Many had faces which were slack or congealed with an icy wonder. Some looked fearful. Their eyes were wide and rolling; their chests rose and fell swiftly; their breaths hissed out. Some were shaking as if an icy wind had swept over them, though the air was pleasantly warm.

The strange thing, the really alien and frightening thing, was the almost complete silence. Nobody said a word; there was only the hissing of breaths of those near him, a tiny slap as a man smacked himself on his leg; a low whistling from a woman.

Their mouths hung open, as if they were about to say something.

They began moving about, looking into each other's faces, sometimes reaching out to lightly touch another. They shuffled their bare feet, turned this way, turned back the other way, gazed at the hills, the trees covered with the huge vividly colored blooms, the lichenous and soaring mountains, the sparkling and green river, the mushroom-shaped stones, the straps and the gray metallic containers.