"Dancers At The End Of Time - 06 - A Messiah At The End Of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

A Messiah at the End of Time
By Michael Moorcock



Chapter One
In which your Auditor gives credit to his Sources
The incidente involving Mr. Jherek Carnelian and Mrs. Amelia Underwood,
their adventures in Time, the
machinations of, among others, the Lord of Canaria, are already familiar to
those of us who follow avidly any fragment
of gossip coming back from the End of Time.
We know, too, why it is impossible to learn further details of how life
progresses there since the inception of
Lord Jagged's grand (and some think pointless) scheme, details of which have
been published in the three volumes
jointly entitled The Dancers at the End of Time and in the single volume,
companion to this, called Legends from the
End of Time.*
Time travelers, of course, still visit the periods immediately preceding
the inception of the scheme: They bring
us back those scraps of scandal, speculation, probable feet and likely lies
which form the bases for the admittedly
fanciful reconstructions I choose to term my "legends from the future" stories
which doubtless would cause much
amusement if those I write about were ever to read them (happily there is no
evidence that the tales survive our present
century, let alone the next few million years).
If this particular tale seems more outrageous and less likely than any of
the others, it is because I was gullible
enough to believe the sketch of it I had from an acquaintance who does not
normally journey so far into the future. A
colleague of Miss Una Persson in the Guild of Temporal Adventurers, he does not
wish me to reveal his name and this,
happily, allows me to be rather more frank about him than would have been
possible.
My friend's stories are always interesting, but they are consistently
highly-colored; his exploits have been
bizarre and his claims incredible: if he is to be believed he has been present
at a good many of the best known key
events in history, including the era* cifixion of Christ, the massacre at Mei
Lei, the assassination of Naomi Jacobsen in
Paris and so on, and has often played a major role.
From his base in West London (20th century, Sectors 3 and 4) my friend has
ranged what he terms the
"chronoflow," visiting periods of the past and future of this Earth as well as
those of other Earths which, he would have
us accept, coexist with ours in a complex system of intersecting dimensions
making up something called the
"multiverse."