"Daniel Keys Moran - Armageddon Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

pit, where lopers and bluewings were roasting on a spit. The glow came from several strange, floating
balls, about two hands across, that emitted an eerie blue radiance.

Sitting on the faded green tatami mats nearest the fire pit, the eight Eldest Hunters, including Morine, the
Eldest Hunter, conferred with the alien gods.

For reasons of their own, the gods had insisted that Jalian be allowed to attend the meeting. Morine
d'Arseny ken Selvren was at first inclined to say no; the child was willful and headstrong, and was not to
be rewarded for her asinine behavior.

The alien gods insisted.

Jalian sat in a dark corner of the Clan House's central hall, separated from the alien gods by fire and the
eight white forms. The alien gods spoke to the Elder Hunters through a machine that spoke
understandable silverspeech, in the voice of the first ken Selvren that had addressed it. It was strange for
Jalian, listening when the alien gods talked; the machine's voice was her mother's.

That they talked in her mother's voice was not the strangest thing about them. The things they talked
about were not even the most interesting things about them, although they were interesting enough:

Of the eight Elder Hunters present, five, including Morine and Morine's daughter Ralesh, knew how to
read and write. Sylva de Kelvin and her daughter Jenna knew the basic rudiments of chemistry and
mathematics. Other Hunters, not present because of low status, knew the arts of medicine and
construction. Though the wastefulness of the Men's World forced a simple lifestyle upon them, the
Silverken Selvren that was ken Hammel, had the capability, as The Real Indians and mutants did not, of
reconstructing a technical civilization, given power and metal.

It was this that the alien gods were offering them; but first they had to explain what an alternate timeline
was, and that took a long, long while.

Like everything else about them, their explanation was strange; but it was not the strangest thing.

What was strangest was the way they looked.

If it is true, as said, that it is only the first time a human looks at a thing that she truly sees it, then it is
probable that Jalian saw the gods more clearly than any of the others in the House's central Hall. Even
Jalian's mother, the youngest of the Elder Hunters present, looking at the gods, was able to put aside her
preconceptions of what a creature should look like only to the point where she perceived a sort of very
large, squarish bear, with tentacles and something like strings of lace hanging about its upper regions.

To Jalian, at the age of six when most things are new and strange, the alien god was a four-limbed,
nearly cubical hunk of furred flesh; there was a double-jointed leg, as thick around as both of a normal
person's legs put together, at each corner of the body. Atop the cube there rose a lattice of interweaving
bars that looked like exposed black bone.

Lace was strung about the lattice; in some spots tightly, in others more loosely. Their tentacles grew out
of the base of the bone lattice; there were about twenty of them, and four of those twenty were thicker
and longer than the rest. The tentacles were covered with a fine, purplish fur that faded to show
purple-black skin at the tips of the tentacles. While Jalian watched, the lace stretched and loosened, as
the bones beneath them shifted positions slightly. Watching the lace, she had the sudden strange, intense