"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

CHAPTER ONE

Nieru, the god of darkness, was descending in the west after his nightly
domination of the sky, his cloak wrapped about him in a glowing purple spiral.
Overhead, Cassona, the goddess who created weather, had become the dawn star.
The three lesser stars of her daughters, the Cassoneids, which oscillated
about her -- Peria, Isthucis, and Dometer, the spirits of wind, rain, and
cloud -- were very close, almost in alignment, which meant that it was early
summer. Compared to the splendor that the night sky had once been, the stars
were few and feeble.
Cassona had once been capricious and vindictive, liable to cleave
mountains with a lightning bolt or send storms to devastate an entire
countryside on a whim. Today, however, she was placid. The morning was clear,
and the first light revealed that the peaks at the far end of the valley
outside Orenash had receded unusually far during the night, with the rooftops
within the city walls and the patches of woodland on the slopes beyond
noticeably lengthened in proportion. During the night, Gralth, the gods'
baker, who kneaded the world as if it were dough, stretched all dimensions in
the east-west direction; he would compress them back to their evening minima
as the day wore on. But so visible an extension at daybreak presaged an
uneventful day ahead.
From an upper window of his uncle's house below the rock upon which
stood the temple of Zos, Thrax brooded to himself, confused and afraid with
the bemusement of a youth whose world was running down just as he was
approaching manhood and thought he had made sense of it.
But these days, everyone was confused and afraid. The old ways were
ceasing to work, and the old wisdom had no answers. Priests prayed, seers
beseeched, and people redoubled their sacrifices. But the force-currents
waned, and life-power ebbed. No signs came; the oracles remained mute. And as
the gods died, their stars were going out.
Some thought that a great war had been waged in the sky, that new gods
had defeated the old, and different laws were coming into being to rule the
world. Mystics spoke of having seen a higher realm that they called Hyperia,
beyond the everyday plane of existence, where perpetual serenity reigned and
impossible happenings were commonplace.
Perhaps, a few of the more hopeful reasoned, the breaking down of the
old laws portended a transition of their world into a phase that would be
governed by the new kinds of laws glimpsed in the world beyond. They
experimented in unheard-of ways to prepare themselves, striving to grasp
strange notions and unfamiliar concepts.

"Hold it, Thrax. I think it needs a bit more play here." Thrax's uncle,
Dalgren, poked inside the contraption standing on the stone slab in his
basement workshop and adjusted a clamp. "And probably this one opposite, too."
It consisted essentially of two pairs of legs, each pair set one behind
the other in an arrangement of vertical slides that allowed either pair to
protrude below the other. In addition, whichever pair was raised could move
lengthwise along a horizontal guide and descend at varying displacements with