"Zach Hughes - The Legend of Miaree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

We live. I am proof of that. We spread the dubious vitality of mankind
to the far ends of this galaxy. We have heard, not with our inferior ears,
but with instruments, the scream of a planet seared in the rush of an
expanding nova, and we have probed into the old star fields at the center
to findтАФwhat? What, Elana?

The dead planets? Death?

Ah, how alone we are.

But the question was thisтАФabout Cygnus: Do we understand the
whole more for having been to far Cygnus?

At first we tried to go back in time, to measure the prime big bang of
creation. Unable to do so, unable to find help in our quest from races
other than our own, we poured a portion of the wealth of an empire of
worlds into a Cygnus expedition, and we found a burning world and
this. This treasury of words. Oh you may, at any time, by appointment
(since it is a popular pastime and in great demand), see in the viewing
rooms the ponderous dance of the dying galaxies, speeded into a motion
which our frail life-span could not cover. This theory and that theory
come forth and we know one more tiny part of our universe, but we are
still unable to define it, no more than primitive man with his theory of
the universe folding back upon itself.

Why do you shiver, Martha from Terra II? Why? Is it the fear of an
emptiness beyond the range of our strongest instruments?

We are mobile to an unbelievable degree. Parsecs are but moments to
us in our known blink patterns. Yet the unknown exists,
representingтАФwhat? Death? Fear? We whistle into the dark maw of
creation and further our knowledge. For what? For pure knowledge? Ah,
we have planets devoted to the worship of data. We usurp a world to
store our facts. We have a planet with machines to work endlessly,
simply to relate out vast store of words.

Our parent sun, my young Healer from the old world, is said to be
billions of years old, and it is a Population I sun, a young star. There at
the center, where the Dead Worlds mock us, the stars are ancient, but
where there was once life there are only death and silence and a hell of
radiation from the densely packed fields of stars, and in all the universe
we are, father and son, my young Healer, still alone.

Forgive me, I ramble. The question of ultimate creation is not
scheduled to be solved this early in the semester. Yes, you may laugh,
Cecile. I congratulate you on being able to understand that I make a
pleasantry.

We are here to discuss a fable, for so your learned men have labeled it,
this story of Miaree, this slim volume, this handful of words. Consider it