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

Wolff did not expect any more word from his father. Urizen had not indicated where he had taken
Chryseis, how Wolff was to find her, or what would be done to Chryseis. Yet Wolff knew what he had
to do. Somehow, he would have to locate the hidden self-enclosed cosmos of his father. Then he
would have to find the gate that would give entrance to the pocket universe. At the same time that
he got ac-cess, he would have to detect and avoid the traps set for him by Urizen. If he succeeded
in doing this-and the probabilities were very low-he would have to get to Urizen and kill him.
Only thus could he rescue Chryseis.

This was the multimillennia-old pattern of the game played among the Lords. Wolff himself, as
Jadawin, the seventh son of Urizen, had survived 10,000 years of the deadly amusement. But he had
managed to do so largely by being content with staying in his own universe. Unlike many of the
Lords, he had not grown tired of the world he had created. He had enjoyed it-although it had been
a cruel enjoy-ment, he had to admit now. Not only had he exploited the natives of his world for
his own purposes, he had set up defenses that had snared more than one Lord-male and female, some
his own brothers and sisters-and the trapped ones had died slowly and horribly. Wolff felt
contrition for what he had done to the inhabitants of his planet. For the Lords he had killed and
tortured, he suffered no guilt. They knew what they were doing when they came into his world, and
if they had beaten his defenses, they would have given him a painful time before he died.

Then Lord Vannax had succeeded in hurling him into the universe of Earth, although at the cost of
being taken along with Jadawin. A third Lord, Arwoor, had moved in to possess Jadawin's world.

Jadawin's memory of his former life had been repressed by the shock of dispossession, of being
cast weaponless into an alien uni-verse and without the means to return to his own world; Jadawin
had become a blank, a tabula rasa. Adopted by a Kentuckian named Wolff, the amnesiac Jadawin had
taken the name of Robert Wolff. Not until he was sixty-six years old did he discover what had
hap-pened before the time that he had stumbled down a Kentucky moun-tain. He had retired from a
lifetime of teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the Phoenix area of Arizona. And there, while
looking through a newly built house for sale, he had begun the series of ad-ventures that took him
through a "gate" back into the universe he had created and had ruled as Lord for 10,000 years.

There he had fought his way up from the lowest level of the monoplanet, an Earth-sized Tower of


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Babylon, to the palace-castle of Lord Arwoor. There he had met and fallen in love with Chryseis,
one of his own semicreations. And he had become the Lord again, but not the same Lord as the one
who had left it. He had become human.

His tears, loosed by his anguish at the loss of Chryseis and the ter-ror of what could happen to
her, were proof of his humanity. No Lord shed tears over another living being, although it was
said that Urizen had cried with joy when he had trapped two of his sons some thousands of years
ago.

No time-waster, Wolff set about doing what had to be done. First, he must make sure that someone
occupied the castle while he was gone. He did not want to repeat what had happened the last time
he had left this world. On returning, he had found another Lord in his place. Now there was only