"Mark S. Geston - TheSiegeOfWonder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

The information was transmitted through the wires implanted in his
skull, neck and torso, and was transcribed onto spheres of frozen helium,
suspended by undetectable magnetic fields in titanium cylinders inside his
ribs. The natural conductance of his skin also carried quick and subtle
messages as his eye spoke directly to the spheres and to the other augmenting
devices that were scattered about his body.
Aden ran his hand idly along his neck and chest; this concourse between
eye and mind and torso itched. Presumably, his scratching had not distorted or
confused the messages.
Aden had been in the Holy City for a month watching, and he felt the
weight of his observations pressing against the interior limits of his
comprehension. The balls of helium, frigid, unitary, utterly pure, rotated as
miniature universes inside of him, informed by the eye, consoled and spoken to
by the hybrid creature of his nervous system. The living dead, the dying life,
the constant shiftings and transmutations of substance and reality, the
extraordinary _inwardness_ of this world, all taken from the minds and
imaginations of its men of power, recompressed by the devices of the Special
Office, and then jammed into the cramped spaces of his brain, to wait for the
monthly block transmissions, when the Office's satellites fearfully skirted
the western horizon and he could rid himself of its terrible density. Aden
cowered before the knowledges accumulating inside of him, and, therefore,
before the wizards. In this fear, he joined the rest of the people who had
allied themselves with this and the other Holy Cities. It was so vastly
different from . . .
He had trouble remembering.
. . . from the precise night of his own world.
The itching stopped, Aden imagined he could tell when the electrical
currents had finished inscribing the new paragraphs on the gaseous spheres.
He pulled his jacket tightly about his shoulders. He had been standing
by the fountain for half an hour since the magician had passed by. A few
merchants in sedan chairs of satinwood and horn passed along the street. While
he thought about his interior circuitries, the eye stirred casually and
discerned what it could of their wealth and what they reflected of the
economic strength of the Holy City. Such considerations meant nothing to the
men of power, and Aden's world knew it, but they still insisted on looking, as
if they wanted to find a common ground of normality in the way the wizards
fought their war.
These were exercises that might have been carried out by any spy,
trivial compared to the recordation of the passing magician and his retinue:
transmutation, his personal triumph over death flouted before the people, his
unarticulated powers outlined by a perceptible nimbus surrounding his head and
chest. These were proper challenges for the capabilities of Aden's eye.
He had to think that, he realized during the first month of his mission,
in order to remain functional. Anything less and he would succumb to the same
spell that half of the world had already fallen under. Either that, or he
would unconsciously betray the curious arrogance that characterized the
proponents of each side in the face of the other, the defensive contempt each
cultivated toward the other's conception of the universe. He would dwell
constantly upon any conceit or belief that would help hold in his delicate and
poorly defined equipoise between half-knowing and half-believing.