"L. E. Modesitt - Corean Chronicles 4 - Alector's Choice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

scraping out a bare existence from a cold and barren land.

Back upstairs in the dressing chamber, while Lystrana bathed, Dainyl
hung the old and warm black tunic on the rack on his side of the chamber
and donned his uniform trousers, dark gray, and his shimmercloth tunic,
brilliant blue with dark gray piping. He adjusted the collar and fastened
the gray officer's belt in place. Next, he checked the crystal charge level in
his sidearm--the standard light-cutter for a Myrmidon officer--then
slipped it into the holster on the left side of the belt.

Last came the gray gloves. Depending on how cool it was outside, he
might actually wear them. The ride to Myrmidon headquarters would
warm him some, especially if the hacker stayed on the sunnier streets.

4

Many worlds have life, but on most, life remains little more than pond
scum, lichens upon the side of a rock facing a cold sun, or tiny animalcules
darting through stagnant waters, too unaware to comprehend danger,
however dimly, and too limited for their offspring or their offspring's
offspring ever to rise from those waters to awareness and thence to
aspirations and dreams to place a stamp upon an uncaring and indifferent
universe.

Upon that mere handful of worlds hosting life-forms that rise above a
thin grasp of rock and water, two kinds of life exist--that which is aimless
and that which is directed, either self-directed or directed from without.
Long have there been those who claim that higher life is always directed
from without, and that such guidance proceeds from a supreme being, a
deity who shapes a world until intelligence emerges, then reveals the
divine will to selected individuals.

This is a most comforting belief, yet, like most unthinking beliefs that
offer comfort, there is little in the universe to support it. The multiplicity
of barren worlds, as well as the demonstrated failures of such "divine
guidance" in our own long history, should disabuse all but the most
misguided of the illusion of the involvement of a supreme being in the
affairs of life and living beings.

In fact, as the chronicles of hundreds of centuries demonstrate, life
arises by chance and as it will. All too often higher life upon a world will
arise, then vanish, at times leaving no record of its passing, at others,
leaving ruins that suggest either poverty of spirit and aspiration or little of
ei-ther, save procreation. Is then life a game of chance, a set of bone-dice
rolling itself against the odds?

Views of the Highest
 Illustra

W.T. 1513