"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 5 - Gods of Riverworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

himself with food and liquor, and his face was waxing into full moonness. His large teeth were very white against his dark
skinтАФnot as dark as Burton'sтАФand his dark brown hair was wavy, not kinky. He could have passed for white, but he had
chosen to stay in the black world on Earth.
"Nigger is how you was raised, how you think," he would sometimes say. "As the Good Book says, it don't do no good to
kick against the pricks." He would laugh softly then, not caring whether or not his hearer understood that by "pricks" he
meant "whites."
"I thought I'd give you thinkers some background music. I'm no good at this kind of thing."




I
32 / Philip lose Farmer
"You've a good mind," Burton said, "and we need it. Besides, we have to act as a team, as soldiers in a small army. If
everybody does what he wants, ignores this crisis, we become just a disorganized mob."
"And you's the captain, the man," Turpin said. "OK."
He brought his hands down, the chords crashed, and he stood up.
"Lead on, MacDuff."
Though he was furious, Burton showed no sign of it. He strode back to the table, Turpin following him too closely, and he
stood by his chair. Turpin, still smiling, took his seat.
"I suggest that we wait until we have mastered the contents of those," Burton said, waving a hand at the mechanism that
was piling, sorting, and collating the papers flying from a slot in the wall. "Once we thoroughly understand what we can
and cannot do, we may make our plans."
"That'll take some time," de Marbot said. "It'll be like reading a library, not one book."
"It must be done."
"You talk of limits," Nur said, "and that is necessary and good. But within what we call limits we have such power as the
greatest kings on Earth never dreamed of. That power will be our strength, but it will also be our weakness. Rather, I
should say, the power will tempt us to misuse it. I pray to God that we will be strong enough to overcome our
weaknessesтАФif we have them."
"We are, in a sense, gods," Burton said. "But humans with godlike power. Half-gods."
"Half-assed gods," Frigate said.
Burton smiled and said, "We've been through much on The River. It's scourged us, winnowed out the chaff. I hope. We
shall see."
"The greatest enemy is not the unknown," Nur said. He did not need to explain what he meant.
An ancient Greek philosopher, Herakleitos, once said, "Character determines destiny."
Burton was thinking of this as he paced back and forth in his bedroom. What Herakleitos said was only partly true.
Everyone had a unique character. However, that character was influenced by environment. And every environment was
unique. Every place was not exactly like every other place. In addition, a person's character was part of the environment he
traveled in. How a person acted depended not only upon his character but also on the peculiar opportunities and constraints
of the environment, which included the person's self. The self carried about in it all the environments that the person had
lived in. These were, in a sense, ghosts, some of thicker ectoplasm than the others, and thus powerful haunters of the
mobile home, the person.
Another ancient sage, Hebrew, not Greek, had said, "There is nothing new under the sun."
The old Preacher had never heard of evolution and so did not know that new species, unfamiliar to the sun, emerged now
and then. Moreover, he overlooked that every newborn baby was unique, therefore new, whether under the sun or under the
moon. Like all sages, the Preacher spoke half-truths.
When he said that there was a time to act and a time not to act, he spoke the whole truth. That is, unless you were a Greek
philosopher and pointed out that not acting is an act in itself. The difference in philosophy between the Greek and the
Hebrew was in their attitudes toward the world. Herakleitos was interested in abstract ethics; the Preacher, in practical
ethics. The former stressed the why, the latter, the how.