"Richard Paul Russo - Watching Lear Dream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russo Richard Paul)

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RICHARD PAUL RUSSO

WATCHING LEAR DREAM

AT NIGHT SAMUEL SAT beside his old friend Lear and watched him dream, Lear's
dreams manifested in the air above his prone and twisting figure, malformed
creatures and almost familiar people and half-living machines that threatened to
become fully substantial and take on strange and complicated lives of their own
in this world. Samuel, too, had once dreamed dreams like these.

But now he kept watch over his old friend. Kept watch over Lear's dreams. And
destroyed those dreams.

Samuel and Lear. They were the last of their kind.

Samuel acted as a gatekeeper, human Cerberus, guarding the natural world from
the supernatural. Doing so, he kept Lear alive. Watching over him, preventing
the old man's dreams from becoming primed realities loosed and wreaking havoc
upon the world, he held back the executioner's axe. As long as Samuel kept
Lear's dreams at bay, DivCom allowed Lear to live.

Lear had once been a DivCom hero. So, too, had Samuel, and the other
twenty-seven like them. They had dreamed into existence strange and powerful
creatures and superhuman beings, incredible living weapons and organic
star-jumping ships, and then, in full control of their creations, directed them
against the invading forces of an alien civilization that attacked them from
somewhere near the heart of the Milky Way. And they had triumphed.

But the others were all dead now, most of them killed during the conflict,
others by accident or old age; two by suicide. Only Samuel and Lear remained,
and they were no longer needed, the conflict years ended, no other foreseen.
They would have been useless even if needed -- Samuel had no more dreams, and
Lear had lost all control of his own. Neither was a hero anymore.

For years Samuel kept watch over Lear, fought Lear's dreams, and dispatched
every one. For years.

Until the day Lear dreamed Teresa back to life.

DivCom had settled the two of them on a sparsely inhabited world, almost
primitive, habitable but lacking exploitable resources. Set them up in a small
house several kilometers upstream from a village that straddled a swiftly
flowing river which poured over stones and crashed around boulders as it came

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