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

for him to do so.


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Lords must eat. Wolff had a light breakfast served by a talos, one of the half-protein robots,
looking like knights in armor, of which he had over a thousand. Then he shaved and showered in a
room carved out of a single emerald. Afterwards, he clothed himself. He wore cor-duroy shoes,
tight-fitting corduroy trousers, a corduroy short-sleeved shirt, open at the neck but with a
collar that curved up in back, a broad belt of mammoth leather, and a golden chain around his
neck. From the chain hung a red jade image of Shambarimen, given to him by the great artist and
artificer of the Lords, when he, Wolff, had been a boy of ten. The red of the jade was the only
bright color of his garments, the rest being a thrush-brown. When in the castle, he dressed simply
or not at all. Only during the rare occasions when he went down to the lower levels for state
ceremonies did he dress in the magnificent robes and complex hat of a Lord. In most of his
descents, he went incognito, clad in the garments or nongarments of the local natives.

He left the walls of the castle to go out onto one of the hundreds of great balcony-gardens. There
was an Eye sitting in a tree, a raven large as a bald eagle. He was one of the few survivors of
the on-slaught on the castle when Wolff had taken this world back from Ar-woor. Now that Arwoor
was dead, the ravens had transferred their loyalty to Wolff.

Wolff told the raven that he was to fly out and look for Kickaha. He would inform other Eyes of
the Lord of his mission and also tell the eagles of Podarge. They must inform Kickaha that he was
wanted at once. If Kickaha did get their message and came to the castle, only to find Wolff gone,
he was to remain there as Lord pro tem. If, after a reasonable interval, Wolff did not return,
Kickaha could then do whatever he wanted.

He knew that Kickaha would come after him and that it was no use forbidding him to do so.

The raven flew off, happy to have a mission. Wolff went back into the castle. The viewers were
still searching, without success, for Kickaha. But the gate-finders, needing only microseconds to
scan and identify, had gone through all the universes and were already on their sixth sweep. He
allowed them to continue on the chance that some gates might be intermittent and the search scan
and gate on-state had not coincided. The results of the first five searches were on paper, printed
in the classical ideographs of the ancient language.

There were thirty-five new universes. Of these, only one had a sin-gle gate.

Wolff had the spectral image of this placed upon a screen. It was a six-pointed star with the
center red instead of white as he had seen it. Red for danger.

As plainly as if Urizen had told him, he knew that this was the gate to Urizen's world. Here I am.
Come and get me-if you dare.

He visualized his father's face, the handsome falcon features with large eyes like wet black
diamonds. Lords were ageless, their bodies held in the physiological grip of the first twenty-five
years of life. But emotions were stronger even than the science of the Lords-working with their