"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 2 - The Gates of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)universe. All the other planets have similar fields."
Wolff did not wonder at this. The Lords could do things with fields and gravitons that the terrestrials had never dreamed of as yet "This planet is entirely covered with water." "What about this island?" he said. "It floats. Its origin is a plant which grows on the bottom of the sea. When it's half-grown, its bladder starts to fill with gas, produced by a bacterium. It unroots itself and floats to the surface. There it ex-tends roots or filaments, which meet with the filaments of others of its kind. Eventually, there's a solid mass of such plants. The upper part of the plant dies off, while the lower part continues to grow. The decaying upper part forms a soil. Birds add their excrement to it. They come to new islands from old islands, and bring seeds in their droppings. These produce the fronds you see and the other vegeta-tion." She pointed at a clump of bamboo-like plants. He asked, "Where did those rocks come from?" There were several whitish boulders, with a diameter of about twelve feet, beyond the bamboos. "The gas bladder plants that form islands are only one of perhaps several thousand species. There's a type that attaches itself to sea-bottom rocks and that carries the rock to the surface when they're buoyant enough. The natives bring them in and place them on the is-lands if they're garzhoo or domesticate it." "What about the drinking water?" "It's a fresh-water ocean." Wolff, glancing through a break in the wilderness of purplish, yellow-streaked fronds and waist- high berry-burdened bushes, saw a tremendous black arc appear on the horizon. In sixty seconds, it had become a sphere and was climbing above the horizon. "Our moon," she said. "Here, things are reversed. There is no sun; the light comes from the sky. So the moon provides night or ab-sence of light. It is a pale sort of night, but better than none. "Later, you will see the planet of Appirmatzum. It is in the center of this universe, and around it the five secondary planets revolve. You will see them, too, all black and sky-filling like our moon." Wolff asked how she knew so much about the structure of Urizen's world. She answered that Theotormon had given the information, though not willingly. He had learned much while a prisoner of Urizen. He had not wanted to part with the information, since he was a surly and selfish beast. But when his brothers, cousins, and sister had caught him, they had forced him to talk. "Most of the scars are healed up," she said. She laughed. Wolff wondered if Theotormon did not have good reasons after all for wanting to kill them. And he |
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