"Moore, C L - The Tree of Life UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

After that he knew what to expect and could make them out
- more easily: little, darting people with .big eyes that shone
with a queer, sorrowful darkness from their small, frightened
- faces as they scuttled through the bushes, dodging always
just out of plain sight among the leaves. He could hear the
soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they
passed near a clump of shrubbery he thought he caught the echo of little whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a strange warning note so clear that be caught it even amid the murmur of their speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves,- and a landscape of tapestried blurring carpeted with a Botticelli flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. He felt quite sure of that;
It was a long while before curiosity awakened in him sufficiently to make him break the stillness. But at last he asked dreamily.
УWher are we going?Ф -
The-girl seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond her hypnotic eyes made, for she turned and caught his eyes in a white stare and answered.
УTo Thag. Thag desire you.Ф
УWhat is Thag?Ф
In answer to that she launched without preliminary upon a little singsong monolog of explanation whose stere~ityped formula made him faintly uneasy with the thoughts that it must have been made very often to attain the status of a set speech; made to many men,-perhaps, whom Thag had desired. And what became of them afterward? he wondered. But the girl was speaking.
УMany ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great King lIar for whom the city was named. He was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough to fulfill all his ambitions. So by his arts he called up out of darkness the being known as Thag, and with him struck a bargain. By that bargain Thag was to give of his limitless power, serving lIar all the days of liarТs life, and in return the king was to create a land for ThagТs dwelling-place and people it with slaves and furnish a priestess to tend ThagТs needs. This is that land. I am that priestess, the latest of a long line of women born to serve Thag. ~Сhe tree-people are hisЧhis lesser servants. -
УI have spoken softly so that the tree-pebple do not heaf, for to them Thag is the center and focus of creation, the end and beginmng of all ljfe. -But to you Ihave toki the truth. У
С~But what does Thag want of me?Ф
УIt is not for Thag Сs servants to question Thag.Ф
- УThen what becomes, afterward, of the men Thag desires?Ф he pursued.
УYou must ask Thag that.Ф
- - She turned her eyes awa-y as she spoke, snapping the mental bond that had flowed between them with a suddenness that left Smith dizzy. He went on at her side more slowly, pulling back a little on the tug of her fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began to stir in the deeps of his mind. After all, there was no reason why he need let this blank-eyed priestess lead him up to the very maw of her god. She had lured him into this land by what he knew now to have been a trick; might she not have worse tricks than that in store for him?
She held him, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of her fingers, if he could keep his eyes turned from hers. Therein lay her real power, but he could fight it if he chose. And he began to hear more clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves. The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.
Suddenly he made up h~ mind. He stopped, breaking the clasp of the girlТs hand.
УIТm not going,Ф he said.
She swung round in ~L sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from her in a gush of incoherence. But he dared not meet her eyes, and they conveyed no meaning to him. Resolutely he turned away, ignoring her voice, and sщ.t out to retracethewaytheyhadcome. Shecalledafterhirnonce, inn high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as that in the rustling vтices of the tree-people, but he kept on doggedly, not looking back. She laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that echoed uneasily in his mind long after the sound of it had died upon the twilight air.
After a while he glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see the luminous dazzle of her body still glowing
in the dim glade where he had left her; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.
He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt his ears, and in a solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk: They had vanished with the fire-bright girl, and the whole twilight land was empty save for himself. He plodded on across the dark grass, crushing the upturned flower-faces under his boots and asking himself wearily if he could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed and tapestried solitude that had swallowed him up. In that thunderous quiet, in that deathly solitude, he went on.
When he had walked for what seemed to him much longer than it should have taken to reach his starting point, and still no sign of an exit appeared,, he began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land of Thag. For the first time he realized that he had come through nQ~tangible gateway. He had only stepped out of a shadow, andЧnow that he thought of itЧthere were no shadows here. The grayness swallowed everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn picture. He looked about helplessly, quite lQst now and not sure in what direction he should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to know directions. The trees~ and shrubs and the starry grass still stretched about him, uncertainly outhned in that changeless dusk. They seemed to go on
forever. I
But he plodd~d ahead, tinwilling to stop because of a queer tension in the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in breathless anticipation, centering upon his stumbling figure. But all trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance СOf the priestessТ whiteglowing figure.. Head down, paying little heed to where he was going, he went on over the flowery sward.
An odd sense of voids about him startled Smith at last out of his lethargic plodding. He lifted his head. He stood just at the edge of a line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyont~ themЧhe came to himself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond them the grass ran down
to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees into a streaked and arching voidЧnot the sort of emptiness into which a material body could fall, but a solid nothing, curving up toward the dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical Thing could have eptered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness ~hich no force could invade.
He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall. Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this way. He could not even bring himself to approach any nearer to that streaked and arching blank. He could not have said why, but it woke in him an inner disquiet so strong that after a momentТs staring he turned his eyes away.
Presently he shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees which parted him from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily he stumbled on over the flowery grass. -
How long he had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of border h~ could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray рolitude he gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. He looke4 up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of nothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. The tree-men had, returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, he went on a bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro, for Smith was wise in the ways
of wild life. - -
Presently, when they saw how little heed he paid them, they began to grow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices he thought he was beginning to catch
threads of familiarity. Now and again a word reached his ears that he seemed to recognize, lost amidst the gibberish of their speech. He kept his head down and his hands quiet, plodding
along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.
Prom the corner of his eye he could see that a little dark tree-man had darted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect the queer, tall stranger.
Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walker among the trees.-In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was moving slowly parallel with his course, staring with all the avid curiosity of wild things at SmithТs plodding figure. And among them the rustling whispers grew louder.
Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees. It was a bit darker here than it had been on. the higher level, and as he went down the slope of its side he saw that among the underbrush which filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village wherethe tree-folk dwelt.
He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as he went down into the dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the boldest among his watchers ran almost at his elbow, twittering their queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still bothered him with its haunting echo of words he knew. When he had reached the center of the hollow he became aware that the little folk bad spread out in a ring to surround him. Wherever he looked their small, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted him. He grinned to himself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.
NoneТ of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute himself spokesman, but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which he caught the words УThagФ and УdangerФ and Уbeware.Ф He recognized the meaning of these words without placing in hIs mind their origins in some tongue he knew. He knit his sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its original root. He had a smattering of more tongues than he could have counted offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one speech. ,But the word УThagФ had a sound like that of the very
ancient -dryland tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest- and most uncouth of all the planetТs languages. And with that clue to guide him he presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far, far more ancient than the ver~dest versions of the tongue he had ever heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And for a moment the sheerest awe came over him, as he realized the significance of what he listened to.
The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far in the past to have record savein the vaguest folklore. Yet here wasapeople who spoke the rudiments of that raceТs tongue as it must have been spoken in the raceТs dim beginnings, perhaps, a million years earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of millenmums set SmithТs mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their span.
There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard king, Illar, had peopled his sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of todayТs dryland dwellers. If they shared the- same tongue they must share the same lineage. AndТ humanityТs remorseless adaptability had done the rest. -.
- It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient plainsmen who had roamed. MarsТ green prairies had dwindled with their dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned bestiality. For here- that same race root had declined into these tiny, slinking creatures with theirdusky skinsand great, staring eyes andtheirvoicesТ
that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie behind that gradual degeneration!
All about him thє whispers still ran. He was beginning to suspect thatthrough countless ages of hiding and munnuring those voices must have lost the ability to speak aloud. And he