"C. L. Moore - Greater Than Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

cube. And, very strangely, it had no look of smallness. Though the cube's
dimensions confined it, here was no miniature scene he gazed upon. He looked
through the cube as through a window, out into a forest glade where upon a
bank of green myrtle at the foot of a white garden wall a little group of
tanned men and women reclined in a circle with closed eyes, lying almost like
corpses on the dark, glossy leaves. But there was no relaxation in them.
Tensity more of the spirit than the body knit the group into a whole, focused
somehow upon the woman in the circle's center-this fair-haired woman who
leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, chin in hand, staring brown-eyed
and tensely into space-into Bill Cory's eyes. Dimly he realized that his
perception had expanded as he stared. Awareness now of a whole countryside
beyond her, just over the garden wall, made this cube that had housed Sallie's
careless smile a window indeed, opening upon distance in space and time far
outside his imagining.
He knew he was dreaming. He was sure of it, though the memory of what Ashley
had been saying hovered uneasily in the back of his mind, too elusive now to
be brought consciously into view. But in this
impossible dream he clenched his hands hard in his pockets, taking a firm hold
upon reality.
"Just who are you, and what do you want? And how did you-"
She chose to answer the last question first, breaking into it as if she could
read his thoughts as she knelt staring on the myrtle leaves.
"I speak to you along an unbroken cord between us-father. Thousands of times
removed, but-father. A cord that runs back through the lives that have parted
us, yet which unite us. With the help of these people around me, their full
mental strength supplementing mine, we've established contact at last, after
so many failures, so much groping in mysteries which even I understand only
partly, though my family for generations has been trained in the secrets of
heredity and telepathy."
"But why-"
"Isn't the fact of achievement an end in itself? Success in establishing a
two-way contact with the past, in talking to one's own ancestors-do I need
more reason for attempting that than the pure joy of achieving it? You wonder
why you were chosen. Is that it? Because you are the last man in a direct line
of males to be born into my family before the blessed accident that saved the
world from itself.
"Don't look so bewildered!" Laughter bubbled from the cube-or was it a sound
in his own brain? "You aren't dreaming! Is it so incredible that along the
unbroken cord of memories which links your mind to mine the current might run
backward against the time flow?"
"But who are you? Your face-it's like-"
"My face is the face of the daughter that Sallie Cory bore you, thousands of
years ago. That resemblance is a miracle and a mystery beyond all
understanding-the mystery of heredity which is a stranger thing than the fact
of our communication. We have wondered among ourselves if immortality
itself-but no, I'll have mercy on you!"
This bewilderingly beloved face that had darkened with mystical brooding,
flashed suddenly alive again with swift laughter, and hearing it, catching a
lift of the brows that was his and a quirk of the soft lips that was Sallie's
own, Bill made no effort to stem the tide of warm affection rising higher and