"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 09 - Flinx's Folly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Ulru-Ujurrian. But this was immeasurably more mature than the brilliant but
juvenile inhabitants of that strange world. It bespoke an ancient lineage as
complex as it was deliberate.

As it boosted him outward, he felt the presence of other minds watching,
observing, unable to participate directly but striving to learn from his experience.
They were utterly different from the intelligence that was propelling him through
space-time yet in many ways more sympathetic to his situation. Then there was
still another type of mind; cold, calculating, observant, utterly indifferent to him
yet not to his condition. In his dream he did not shy away from it, but neither
could he embrace it, nor it him.

Outward, onward, past stars and through nebulae, the immenseness of space, the
conflicting clash of civilizations and galaxies. Gravity washed over him in waves
but had no effect on his progress. He was and yet he wasn't. Devoid of control
over what was conveying him, he could only go with the glow.


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Abruptly, he was in a place of nothingness: no stars, no worlds, no blazing
brightness of intelligence burning in the darkness of the void. All was silent and
dead. Of burnt-out stars not even cinders were left, the last scraps of helium ash
evanesced like table dust on a windy day. He was drifting in a place that defined
winter itself: a region where nothing existed. It was as if matter and energy had
never been.

What was worse, he had been here before.

In the absence of light and thought and substance there was only evil. From the
standpoint of physicsтАФhigh, low, or metaтАФit made no sense. In the absence of
anything, there should be nothing. Yet it was present, and in a form so
incalculable that even to begin to try to describe it would have taxed the efforts
of theologian and physicist alike. Flinx did not need to quantify it: he knew of it,
and that was enough. More than enough.

Why show it to him again, now? Was he doomed to dream of it more and more
often? As before, he felt that it somehow fell to him to do something about it.
But what? How could one tiny bit of shortlived organic matter like himself in
any way affect something that could only begin to be measured on an
astronomical scale? He was no nearer an answer to that question than he had
been when first he had been projected into an encounter with this far-distant
phenomenon that lay behind the Great Emptiness.

It was moving. No, that wasn't it. It had always been moving. What was different
this time was a sense of acceleration. Throughout the length and breadth of the
entire dreadful phenomenon, he sensed a distinct increase in velocity. And
something worse.