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

And then reluctantly he felt the exhilaration begin to fade. He fought against
the force that was drawing him backward, clinging stubbornly to this new and
intoxicating pleasure, but despite himself the vision was paling, the
constellations fading. The dark rolled suddenly away, curtainwise, and with a
jerk he was back again in Julhi 's queerly walled room, solid and human once
more, and Julhi's lovely and incredible body was pressing close to his, her
magical voice humming again through his head.
It was a wordless humming she sang now, but it chose its
pitch unerringly to play upon the nerves she sought, and his heart began to
hammer and his breath came fast, and the noise of war was roaring in his ears.
That singing was a Valkyrie battle-chant, and he heard the crash of conflict
and the shouts of struggling men, smelled burnt flesh and felt the kick of the
ray-gun's butt against his gripping hand. All the sensations of battle poured
over him in unrelated disarray. He was aware of smoke and dust and the smell
of blood, felt the pain of ray-burns and the bite of blades, tasted sweat and
salt blood, knew again the feel of his fists crashing into alien faces, the
heady surge of power through his long, strong body. The wild exhilaration of
battle flamed through him in deepening waves to the sorcery of Julhi's song.
It grew stronger then, and more intense, until the physical sensation faded
wholly and nothing was left but that soul-consuming ecstasy, and that in turn
intensified until he no longer stood upon solid ground, but floated free
through void again, pure emotion divorced from all hint of flesh. Then the
void took nebulous shape around him, as he passed upward by the very intensity
of his ecstasy into some higher land beyond the reach of any sense he
possessed. For a while he floated through cloudy shapes of alien form and
meaning. Little thrills of perception tingled through the calm of his
exultation as he brushed by the misty things that peopled the cloudland to
which he had penetrated. They came swifter, until that calm was rippled across
and across with conflicting thrills and ecstasies that ran at cross-currents
and tossed up little wavelets, and clashed together, and-
Everything spun dizzily and with breath-taking abruptness he leaned once more
in Julhi's embrace. Her voice lilted through his brain.
"That was new! I've never gone so high before, or even suspected that such a
place existed. But you could not have endured that pitch of ecstasy longer,
and I am not ready yet for you to die. Let us sing now of terror. ..."
And as the tones that went humming over him shivered through his brain, dim
horrors stirred in their sleep and lifte'
ghastly heads in the lowest depths of his consciousness to the awakening call
of the music, and terror rippled along his nerves until the air dimmed about
him again and he was fleeing unnamable things down endless vistas of insanity,
with that humming to hound him along.
So it went. He ran the gamut of emotion over and over again. He shared the
strange sensations of beings he had never dreamed existed. Some he recognized,
but more he could not even guess at, nor from what far worlds their emotions
had been pilfered, to lie hoarded in Julhi's mind until she evoked them again.
Faster they came, and faster. They blew over him in dizzy succession, unknown
emotions, familiar ones, strange ones, freezingly alien ones, all hurrying
through his brain in a blurred confusion, so that one merged into another and
they two into a third before the first had done more than brush the surface of
his consciousness. Faster still, until at last the whole insane tumult blended