"03.Time Streams" - читать интересную книгу автора (McGough Scott)

so many afternoons. She checked for breath and pulse, found
both, and set a hand on his brow to check for fever. He felt
warm, though that might have been only from the sunlight.
There was a better test for fever. Her heart pounding, she
leaned over and kissed his forehead.
"Hot. Yes. Very hot," Jhoira said breathlessly.
She removed her outer cloak, snagged a bit of scrub, and
propped the fabric up over his face, shielding him from the
sun. She retrieved a small canteen from her belt, parted the
man's lips, and poured a cool trickle of water into his
mouth.
He was beautiful-tan, strong, tall, and mysterious. That
was the most important thing of all. The last drops fell
from the canteen.
"You stay here," she whispered, patting his shoulder.
"Don't let anybody see you. I'll go get more water and
blankets-supplies. I'll take care of you. Stay here."
Heart fluttering in her breast like a caged bird, Jhoira
hurried away from her secret spot and her secret stranger.
Her footsteps had hardly faded beyond the rocky rise
when the stranger's blue eyes opened. There was a gleam in
them, something vaguely metallic. It might have been only
the silver shimmer of clouds reflecting there, but there
might have been something else to that gleam, something
mechanical, something menacing.

Monologue

At last, Urza has done it, making a machine that really
lives. He's been working for three thousand years to devise
such a thing. Now that he has one, he doesn't know what to
do with him.
The silver man is engineered to let Urza return in time,
even farther back than those three thousand years, to the
time of the ancient Thran. Urza hopes the probe can reach
the time of that ancient race, some six millennia in the
past. If Urza himself could reach such a time, he could
prevent the Thran from transforming into the race of half-
flesh, half-machine abominations that seek to destroy life
on Dominaria, thereby rectifying the error he and his
brother Mishra made in opening the doors to Phyrexia.
I've pointed out that unmaking the Phyrexians is
tantamount to slaying all of us who have lived in this world
since their creation. Still, Urza would rather wipe the
slate clean than deal with his past-just as he did at
Argoth.
The disturbing thing is, he is making all the same
mistakes over again. If he could only have embraced his
brother instead of attacking him-if he could only have
apologized for his arrogance and obsession and been