"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 2 - The Gates of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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THE GATES OF CREATION

Philip Jose Farmer

I

Thousands of years ago, the lords had used drugs, electron-ics, hypnotism, and psychotechniques to
do without sleep. Their bod-ies stayed fresh and vigorous, their eyes unclouded, for days and
nights, for months. But their minds eventually crumbled. Halluci-nations, unbounded anger, and an
unreasonable sense of doom gripped them. Some went mad forever and had to be killed or
im-prisoned.

It was then that the Lords found that even they, makers of uni-verses, owners of a science that
put them only one step below the gods, must dream. The unconscious mind, denied communication with
the sleeping conscious, revolted. Its weapon was madness, with which it toppled the pillars of
reason.

So, all Lords now slept and dreamed.

Robert Wolff, once called Jadawin, Lord of the Planet of Many Levels, of a world that was
constructed like a Tower of Babylon, dreamed.

He dreamed that a six-pointed star had drifted through a window into his bedroom. Whirling, it
hung in the air above the foot of his bed. It was a pandoogaluz, one of the ancient symbols of the
religion in which the Lords no longer believed. Wolff, who tended to think mostly in English,
thought of it as a hexaculum. It was a six-sided star, its center glowing white, each of its
facets flashing a ray, a scar-let, an orange, an azure, a purple, a black, and a yellow. The
hex-aculum pulsed like the heart of the sun, and the rays javelined out, raking his eyelids
lightly. The beams scratched the skin as a house cat might extend a claw to wake its sleeping
master with the tiniest sting.

"What do you want?" Wolff said, and knew he was dreaming. The hexaculum was a danger; even the
shadows that formed between its beams were thick with evil. And he knew that the hexaculum had
been sent by his father, Urizen, whom he had not seen for two thou-sand years. "Jadawin!"

The voice was silent, the words formed by the six rays, which now bent and coiled and writhed like
snakes of fire. The letters into which they shaped themselves were of the ancient alphabet, the
original writing of the Lords. He saw them glowing before him, yet he under-stood them not so much
through the eye as through a voice that spoke deep within him. It was as if the colors reached
into the center of his mind and evoked a long-dead voice. The voice was deep, so deep it vibrated
his innermost being, whirled it, and threatened to bend it into nightmare figures that would
forever keep their shape.

"Wake up, Jadawin!" his father's voice said. By these words, Wolff knew that the flashing-rayed
hexaculum was not only in his mind but existed in reality. His eyes opened, and he stared up at
the concave ceiling, self-luminous with a soft and shifting light, veined with red, black, yellow,
and green. He put out his left hand to touch Chryseis, his wife, and found that her side of the
bed was empty.