"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.Transition.Of.Titus.Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

'You have not explored all the possibilities, my love. Kthanid has explained it to me: your vessel is not restricted to time and space alone.' I could almost feel her marvelous green tresses against my cheek, her urgent lips against my
ear.
'But how can I - I don't understand!'
'You have taken control of the vessel with your mind. Its controls are in your mental grasp, but you have not yet mastered all of them!'
'Other controls?' I answered. 'Yes, I believe there are other controls. But they are meaningless to me.' I could feel the time-clock spreading out about me, and the very atoms of my body with it. 'I don't understand the other controls, can't use them!'
'The controls you do understand are useless to you here. Release them! Do it now, love, before it is too late. Then take possession of those unknown controls. It is the only way!
The only way! I released what remaining mental grip I had on the ... she had said, could it be so? Had I been

merely taxiing a plane around the airfield, never once attempting to fly? . . . meaningless they might be, and their purposes . . .
And if I failed? Then the spirit of my goddess would go down to the Black Hole with me!
Freed now from those previous mental restrictions I had been imposing, the vessel sped faster still; wider its sundering atoms spaced themselves, and mine too. Desperately I sought to manipulate, activate those sections of the clock's complex psyche hitherto avoided. No good! My mind was human; this damned device, this impossible vehicle had been built by gods! And goddesses?
And then, knowing that I turned to her for help, she spoke to me again. And now she, too, was desperate: 'Not that way, Titus! There are dimensions other than the four you know. Do not try to draw back from the Black Hole, nor yet to circumvent it. Simply move . . . away from it!'
At last I had the answer, and now I meshed myself deeper still into the clock's inhuman being. We were one again, the clock and I, and finally I recognized an escape route - no, a hundred escape routes away from the fiendish pull of the Black Hole. I chose one of them barely in time, melted into it!
Instantly the scanners opened like windows in my mind, affording me one fantastic, horrific glimpse outside the clock before I sent my vessel darting into yet another previously unsuspected alleyway between dimensions. For in that first there had been a blue ocean of light filled with drifting figures of rainbow hues and starkly geometric design; and in and about these aimless, helpless patterns ambitiously dark and slender cylinders had roved, snapping up the slower shapes as large, fish devour small ones. My flight from that place is most easily explained: those black cylinders had been immediately aware of the clock.

and even as it appeared among them they had darted in
my direction! Ah, but whatever they were, they could not follow me
between dimensions!
Only then, emerging into that second parallel dimension, did I realize that my goddess had left me once more. I heard her beautiful voice, retreating in my mind, its telepathic echo bidding me farewell:
7 go now. Kthanid sends me a Great Thought to guide my spirit home. Take care, my love, that we may be one in Elysia!' And then she was gone. I sent my thanks silently after her, to follow her through what I guessed must be many eternities to her home in Elysia.
Now I could look about me at this new place, ready on the instant to slip away again between dimensions should danger threaten. But no, no danger here. Here I moved through vast orange spaces in which, afar, scarlet jewel stars twinkled against a background of red-tinged infinities. Flat disk-shapes with the diameters of worlds but no apparent thickness whatever, spun by; between them tiny, flat diamond shapes moved in obviously intelligent jour-neyings. A cluster of these diamonds were . . .
. . . this strange dimension, to a place which I hoped would be many light-years away from the monstrous Black Hole of my own universe. Only then would I dare make the trip back through the dimensional barriers, which my vessel penetrated like sunlight through shallow
water.
When at last I fancied that . . .
. . . hopeless! . . .
... to starvation. Such was my hunger by then that I cared not a damn whether I set the clock down on an alien world in an alien time, or on some prehistoric ...
. . . own longed-for universe of three dimensions, no,

four, for now I accepted time, too, as my element. And thus, no worse for my many ordeals, I ...
. . . not Earth, however, nor had I the remotest idea in which direction my home planet lay. Still, there . . .
8 Of Alien Life-Forms
.. hinted at ... those many worlds of wonder I visited after leaving the Cretaceous . . . different again, with . . . tell you?
De Marigny, you know how there are creatures that dwell in the most inaccessible, inhospitable places above, on and under the Earth and in her oceans? I am talking about life-forms you can find in any handbook of zoology, as opposed to those fearsome beings of the Cthulhu Cycle with which we are now so familiar. Well, there are also creatures which exist in the most obscure and random corridors and corners of time, in lost and unthinkable abysses of space, and in certain other twilight places which are most easily explained by referring to them as junctions of forces neither temporal nor spatial, places which by all rights should only exist in the wildest imaginings of theoreticians and mathematicians.
. . . wonder how this can possibly be; one might as well ponder Hans Geisler's photographs of great burrowing bivalves which suck up sustenance from the aeon-deposited muck of the Taumotu Trench, six miles deep in the sea; or the microbes that thrive in the mud of boiling geysers. And if one considers . . . multiverse . . . impossible?
Suffice to say, then, that there are extreme forms of life within and without this universe of ours. And I know it to be so for I have seen or learned of many such forms.

For instance:
. . . intelligent energies in the heart of a giant alien sun who measure time in ratios of nuclear fission and space in unimaginable degrees of pressure! There are wraithlike biological gases which issue at the dark of their moon from the fissures of a fungoid world in Hydra, to dance away their brief lives until, exhausted, they die at dawn, scattering the sentient seeds of mushroom minds which will sprout and take root, and whose crevice-deep roots will in turn emit at the dark of the moon euphoric, spore-bearing mists of genesis.
There is a dying purple sun on Andromeda's rim whose rays support life on all seven of its planets. On the fourth planet there are exactly seventeen forms of life, or so it would appear. On closer inspection, however, a zoologist could tell you that these forms are all different phases of only one life-form! Consider the batrachian and lepidop-terous cycles of Earth life and this might not seem too astonishing, until I tell you that of these seventeen phases two are as apparently inanimate mineral deposits, six are aquatic, two others amphibious, three land-dwelling cannibals, three more are aerial and the last is to all intents and purposes a plant while all of its preliminary stages (excluding the mineral phases) were animal! And to ... ... the time-stream of a distant and utterly alien universe, a one-dimensional entity argues continually with its past and future selves on the improbability of space! And beyond . . . life as a terminal disease?. . .
... I mention all of these things, Henri, to help you in the first instance to understand the diversity and tenacity of life, but mainly as an introduction to what I...
NOTE: Here the contents of almost a complete tape have been lost.
ADM

9 The Lake of Doomed Souls
. . . Hyades, though I did not know that then. Indeed I knew nothing of the whereabouts of my present refuge, neither in time nor in space. When a man flees for his life in the dark he takes whatever route is open to him; he only looks before leaping if he has time. One thing I knew for certain, though: this was not Earth. Never in any period of our planet's prehistory that I know of has it looked like that! And God forbid it ever look that way in the future.
There were moons, Henri, strange moons whose orbits were about other moons as well as the parent planet, so that they seemed to circle or spiral across the sky. And the stars - they were black! I suppose, looking back on it now, that those things alone should have told me where I was, but my mind was so badly battered and bruised that I was hardly capable of knowing anything, merely of accepting. And one thing I accepted gratefully: for the nonce I was again free of Them, the vampires of time, the Tind'losi Hounds.
Well, I was exhausted and I slept. In that dreamless sleep, still ephemerally attached as my dormant mind was to the psyche of the clock, I knew that day had come and that a sun, or suns, had walked the sky, and that now night was once more upon this weird world. Surely enough, when I awakened I saw in the scanners that black stars hung again in the sky; the ashen moons were spiraling in sulfurous, ocher heavens.
I knew instinctively that I dared not leave my vessel, no, not for an instant, for the atmosphere of this world

would kill me as surely as immersion in.sulfuric acid. Not a comforting thought, that . . .