"MIchael Moorcock - The Dancers At The End Of Time 01 - An Alien Heat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

10 The Granting of Her Heart's Desire
11 The Quest for Bromley
12 The Curious Comings and Goings of Snoozer Vine
13 The Road to the Gallows: Old Friends in New Guises
14 A Further Conversation with the Iron Orchid



The silver lips of lilies virginal,
The full deep bosom of the enchanted rose
Please less than flowers glass-hid from frosts and snows
For whom an alien heat makes festival.
Theodore Wratislaw
Hothouse Flowers
1896




Prologue
The cycle of the Earth (indeed, the universe, if the truth had been known) was nearing its end and
the human race had at last ceased to take itself seriously. Having inherited millennia of scientific and
technological knowledge it used this knowledge to indulge its richest fantasies to play immense
imaginative games, to relax and create beautiful monstrosities. After all, there was little else left to do. An
earlier age might have been horrified at what it would have judged a waste of resources, an appalling
extravagance in the uses to which materials and energies were put. An earlier age would have seen the
inhabitants of this world as "decadent" or "amoral," to say the least. But even if these inhabitants were not
conscious of the fact that they lived at the end of time some unconscious knowledge informed their
attitudes and made them lose interest in ideals, creeds, philosophies and the conflicts to which such things
give rise. They found pleasure in paradox, aesthetics and baroque wit; if they had a philosophy, then it
was a philosophy of taste, of sensuality. Most of the old emotions had atrophied, meant little to them.
They had rivalry without jealousy, affection without lust, malice without rage, kindness without pity. Their
schemes тАФ often grandiose and perverse тАФ were pursued without obsession and left uncompleted
without regret, for death was rare and life might cease only when Earth herself died.
Yet this particular story is about an obsession which overtook one of these people, much to his own
astonishment. And because he was overtaken by an obsession that is why we have a story to tell. It is
probably the last story in the annals of the human race and, as it happens, it is not dissimilar to that which
many believe is the first.
What follows, then, is the story of Jherek Carnelian, who did not know the meaning of morality, and
Mrs. Amelia Underwood, who knew everything about it.




1

A Conversation with the Iron Orchid
 Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Orchid and her son sat upon a cream-coloured
beach of crushed bone. Some distance off a white sea sparkled and whispered. It was the afternoon.
Between the Iron Orchid and her son, Jherek Carnelian, lay the remains of a lunch. Spread on a