"C. L. Moore - Julhi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

tides, taking fantastic shapes as it flowed. And those shapes were controlled
in a measure by the brain of the observer, so that he saw what he expected to
see in the nebulous outlines of the dark.
The force buoyed him up with a heady exhilaration more intoxicating than wine.
In long arcs and plunges he swept on through the spangled night, finding that
he could control his course in some dim way he managed without understanding.
It was as if he had wings spread out upon conflicting currents, and by the
poise and beat of them rode the air more easily than a bird-yet he knew that
his strange new body bore no wings. For a long while he swept and curved and
volplaned upon those forces which flowed invisibly through the dark, giddy
with the intoxicating joy of flight. He was aware of neither up nor down in
this starry void. He was weightless, disembodied, a joyous ghost breasting the
air-currents upon unreal wings. Those points of light which flecked the
blackness lay strewn in clusters and long winnowed swaths and strange
constellations. They were not distant, like real stars, for sometimes he
plunged through a swarm of them and emerged with the breathless sensation of
one who has dived into a smother of foaming seas and risen again, yet the
lights were intangible to him. That refreshing sensation was not a physical
one, nor were the starry points real. He could see them, but that was all.
They were like the reflections of something far away in some distant
dimension, and though he swung his course straight through a clustering galaxy
he did not disarrange a single star. It was his own body which diffused itself
through them like smoke, and passed on gasping and refreshed.
As he swept on through the dark he began to find a tantalizing familiarity in
the arrangement of some of those starry groups. There were constellations he
knew . . . surely that was Orion, striding across the sky. He saw Beteleguese
's redly glowing eye, and Rigel 's cold blue blaze. And beyond, across gulfs
of darkness, twin Sirius was spinning, blue-
white against the black. The red glimmer in the midst of that wide swath of
spangles must be Antares, and the great clustering galaxy that engulfed
it-surely the Milky Way! He swerved upon the currents that bore him up, tilted
wide, invisible pinions and plunged through its sparkling froth of stars,
intoxicated with the space-devouring range of his flight. He spanned a billion
light-years with one swoop, volplaned in a long steep curve across a universe.
He looked for the tiny sun round which his native planets spun, and could not
find it in the wilderness of splendor through which he was plunging. It was a
giddy and joyous thing to know that his body dwelt upon some light-point too
small to be seen, while here in the limitless dark he soared heedlessly
through a welter of constellations, defying time and space and matter itself.
He must be swooping through some airy plane where distance and size were not
measured in the terms he knew, yet. upon whose darkness the reflections of
familiar galaxies fell.
Then in his soaring course he swept on beyond the familiar stars, across an
intervening gulf of dark, and into another spangled universe whose
constellations traced strange and shining patterns across the sky. Presently
he became aware that he was not alone. Outlined like wraiths against the
blackness, other forms went plunging down the space ways, sweeping in long
curves upon currents of flowing force, plunging into smothers of starry
brilliance and bursting through a-sparkle with it to go swinging on again down
swooping arcs of darkness.