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

In these shimmering unstable streets he saw for the first time in full light
shapes which must be like that of the creature which had seized him in the
dark. They were of Julhi's race, unmistakably, but he saw now that in her
metamorphosis into a denizen of his own world she had perforce taken on a more
human aspect than was normally her own. The beings that glided through Vonng's
strangely altered streets could never have been mistaken, even at the first
glance, as human. Yet they gave even more strongly than had Julhi the queer
impression of being exquisitely fitted for some lofty purpose he could not
guess at, their shapes of a perfect proportion toward which mankind might have
aimed and missed. For the hint of humanity was there, as in man there is a
hint of the beast. Julhi in her explanation had made them seem no more than
sensation-eaters, intent only upon the gratification of hunger. But, looking
upon their perfect, indescribable bodies, he could not believe that the goal
for which they were so beautifully fashioned could be no more than that. He
was never to know what that ultimate goal was, but he could not believe it
only the satisfaction of the senses.
The shining crowds poured past him down the streets, the whole scene so
unstable that great rifts opened in it now and again to let the ruins of that
other Vonng show through. And against this background of beauty and
uncertainty he was sometimes aware of Apri, rigid and agonized, a living torch
to light him on his way. She was not in the Vonng of the alien plane nor in
that of the ruins, but somehow hung suspended between the two in a dimension
of her own. And whether he moved or not, she was always there, dimly present,
radiant and rebellious, the shadow of a queer, reluctant madness behind her
tortured eyes.
In the strangeness of what lay before him he scarcely
heeded her, and he found that when he was not thinking directly of the girl
she appeared only as a vague blur somewhere in the back of his consciousness.
It was a brain-twisting sensation, this awareness of overlapping planes.
Sometimes in flashes his mind refused to encompass it and everything shimmered
meaninglessly for an instant before he could get control again.
Julhi was beside him. He could see her without turning. He could see a great
many strange things here in a great many queer, incomprehensible ways. And
though he felt himself more unreal than a dream, she was firm and stable with
a different sort of substance from that she had worn in the other Vonng. Her
shape was changed too. Like those others she was less human, less describable,
more beautiful even than before. Her clear, unfathomable eye turned to him
limpidly. She said,
' 'This is my Vonng,'' and it seemed to him that though her humming thrilled
compellingly through the smoky im-materialism which was himself, her words, in
some new way, had gone directly from brain to brain with no need of that
pseudo-speech to convey them. He realized then that her ij voice was
primarily not for communication, but for | hypnosis-a weapon more potent
than steel or flame. >
She turned now and moved away over the tiled street, her gait a liquidly
graceful gliding upon those amazing lower limbs. Smith found himself drawn
after her with a power he could not resist. He was smokily impalpable and
without any independent means of locomotion, and he followed her as helplessly
as her shadow followed. I At a corner ahead of them a group of the nameless
being&J had paused in the onward sweep which was carrying so many*' of Vonng's