"Jack Vance - Green Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

black hair, a gnarled nose, a small heavy mouth. He felt no great sensitivity about his appearance, but
realized that it might be improved. In his mind's eye he pictured the personified ideal of himself: he was
taller by six inches, his nose thin and keen, his skin cleared of its muddy undertone. A striking figure,
but still recognizable as Howard Fair. He wanted the love of women, but he wanted it without the
interposition of his craft. Many times he had brought beautiful girls to his bed, lips wet and eyes shining;
but purple magic had seduced them rather than Howard Fair, and he took limited satisfaction in such
conquests.

Here was the first factor which drew Howard Fair back to the green lore; the second was his yearning for
extended, perhaps eternal, life; the third was simple thirst for knowledge.

The fact of Gerald McIntyre's death, or dissolution, or Disappearance--whatever had happened to him--
was naturally a matter of concern. If he had won to a goal so precious, why had he died so quickly? Was
the "infinite reward" so miraculous, so exquisite, that the mind failed under its possession? (If such was
the case, the reward was hardly a reward.)

Fair could not restrain himself, and by degrees returned to a study of green magic. Rather than again
invoke the sprite whose air of indulgent contempt he had found exasperating, he decided to seek
knowledge by an indirect method, employing the most advanced concepts of technical and cabalistic
science.

He obtained a portable television transmitter which he loaded into his panel truck along with a receiver.
On a Monday night in early May, he drove to an abandoned graveyard far out in the wooded hills, and
there, by the light of a waning moon, he buried the television camera in graveyard clay until only the
lens protruded from the soil.

With a sharp alder twig he scratched on the ground a monstrous outline. The television lens served for
one eye, a beer bottle pushed neck-first into the soil the other.

During the middle hours, while the moon died behind wisps of pale cloud, he carved a word on the dark

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 Green Magic

forehead; then recited the activating incantation.

The ground rumbled and moaned, the golem heaved up to blot out the stars.

The glass eyes stared down at Fair, secure in his pentagon.

"Speak!" called out Fair. "Enteresthes, Akmai Adonai Bidemgir! Elohim, pa rahulli! Enteresthes, HVOI!
Speak!"

"Return me to earth, return my clay to the quiet clay from whence you roused me."

"First you must serve."

The golem stumbled forward to crush Fair, but was halted by the pang of protective magic.

"Serve you I will, if serve you I must."