"Jack Vance - The Dying Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

TURJAN SAT in his workroom, legs sprawled out from the stool, back against and
elbows on the bench. Across the room was a cage; into this Turjan gazed with
rueful vexation. The creature in the cage returned the scrutiny with emotions
beyond conjecture.
It was a thing to arouse pityтАФa great head on a small spindly body, with
weak rheumy eyes and a flabby button of a nose. The mouth hung slackly wet,
the skin glistened waxy pink. In spite of its manifest imperfection, it was to
date the most successful product of Turjan's vats.
 Turjan stood up, found a bowl of pap. With a long-handled spoon he held
food to the creature's mouth. But the mouth refused the spoon and mush
trickled down the glazed skin to fall on the rickety frame.
Turjan put down the bowl, stood back and slowly returned to his stool. For
a week now it had refused to eat. Did the idiotic visage conceal perception, a
will to extinction? As Turjan watched, the white-blue eyes closed, the great
head slumped and bumped to the floor of the cage. The limbs relaxed: the
creature was dead.
Turjan sighed and left the room. He mounted winding stone stairs and at
last came out on the roof of his castle Miir, high above the river Derna. In
the west the sun hung close to old earth; ruby shafts, heavy and rich as wine,
slanted past the gnarled boles of the archaic forest to lay on the turfed
forest floor. The sun sank in accordance with the old ritual; latter-day night
fell across the forest, a soft, warm darkness came swiftly, and Turjan stood
pondering the death of his latest creature.
He considered its many precursors: the thing all eyes, the boneless
creature with the pulsing surface of its brain exposed, the beautiful female
body whose intestines trailed out into the nutrient solution like seeking
fibrils, the inverted inside-out creatures . . . Turjan sighed bleakly. His
methods were at fault; a fundamental element was, lacking from his synthesis,
a matrix ordering the components of the pattern.
As he sat gazing across the darkening land, memory took Turjan to a night
of years before, when the Sage had stood beside him.
"In ages gone," the Sage had said, his eyes fixed on a low star, "a
thousand spells were known to sorcery and the wizards effected their wills.
Today, as Earth dies, a hundred spells remain to man's knowledge, and these
have come to us through the ancient books ... But there is one called
Pandelume, who knows all the spells, all the incantations, cantraps, runes,
and thaumaturgies that have ever wrenched and molded space .. ." He had fallen
silent, lost in his thoughts.
"Where is this Pandelume?" Turjan had asked presently.
"He dwells in the land of Embelyon," the Sage had replied, "but where this
land lies, no one knows."
"How does one find Pandelume, then?"
The Sage had smiled faintly. "If it were ever necessary, a spell exists to
take one there."
Both had been silent a moment; then the Sage had spoken, staring out over
the forest
"One may ask anything of Pandelume, and Pandelume will answerтАФprovided
that the seeker performs the service Pandelume requires. And Pandelume drives