"John Norman - Gor 04 - Nomads of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

had in battle slain the other, and thus among men, save
perhaps for some among the Wagon Peoples, the secret had
been lost. It was only in the Sardar Mountains that I had
learned the nature of their mission, and what it was that they
had carried. Now I supposed that I alone, of humans on
Gor, with the possible exception of some among the Wagon
Peoples, knew the nature of the mysterious object which once
these two brave men had brought in secrecy to the plains of
Turia and, to be truthful, I did not know that even I
should I see it-would know it for what I sought.
Could I, Tarl Cabot, a human and mortal, find this object


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and, as Priest-Kings now wished, return it to the Sardar├Д
return it to the hidden courts of Priest-Kings that it might
there fulfill its unique and irreplaceable role in the destiny of
this barbaric world, Gor, our Counter-Earth?
I did not know.
What is this object?
One might speak of it as many things, the subject of
secret, violent intrigues; the source of vast strifes beneath the
Sardar, strifes unknown to the men of Gor; the concealed,
precious, hidden hope of an incredible and ancient race; a
simple germ; a bit of living tissue; the dormant potentiality of
a people's rebirth, the seed of gods├Дan egg├Дthe last and
only egg of Priest-Kings.
But why was it I who came?
Why not Priest-Kings in their ships and power, with their
fierce weapons and fantastic devices?
Priest-Kings cannot stand the sun.
They are not as men and men, seeing them, would fear
them. Men would not believe they were Priest-Kings. Men con-
ceive Priest-Kings as they conceive themselves.
The object the egg might be destroyed before it could
be delivered to them.
It might already have been destroyed.
Only that the egg was the egg of Priest-Kings gave me
occasion to suspect, to hope, that somehow within that mys-
terious, presumably ovoid sphere, if it still entwisted, quiescent
but latent, there might be life.
And if I should find the object, why should I not myself
destroy it, and destroy thereby the race of Priest-Kings,
giving this world to my own kind, to men, to do with as they
pleased, unrestricted by the laws and decrees of Priest-Kings
that so limited their development, their technology? Once I
had spoken to a Priest-King of these things. He had said to
me, "Man is a larl to man; if we permitted him, he would be