"Vance, Jack - Dying Earth 01 - The Dying Earth (Mazirian the Magician)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

TURJAN OPENED HIS EYES. HE WAS BACK ON EARTH.

It was night in the city of Kaiin, and festival time. Orange lanterns floated in the air, and from the balconies dangled flower chains and cages of blue fireflies. The streets surged with the wine-flushed populace, costumed in a multitude of bizarre modes. Here was a Melantine bargeman, here a warrior of Valdaran's Green Legion, here another of ancient times wearing one of the old helmets. In a clearing, a garlanded courtesan of the Kauchique littoral danced the Dance of the Fourteen Silken Movements to the musk of flutes. In the shadows a girl barbarian embraced a man blackened and in leather harness as a Deodand of the forest....

They were gay, these people of waning Earth, feverishly merry, for infinite night was close at hand, when the red sun should finally flicker and go black.

Books by Jack Vance

The Best of Jack Vance
The Dying Earth
The Eyes of the Overworld

Published by TIMESCAPE/POCKET BOOKS

THE DYING EARTH

Jack Vance

A TIMESCAPE BOOK
PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK


A Timescape Book published by
POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of
GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
Copyright 1950 by Hillman Periodicals, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce , this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Timescape Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020
ISBN: 0-671-44184-1
First Pocket Books printing March, 1977
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
Use of the trademark TIMESCAPE is by exclusive license from Gregory Benford, the trademark owner.
Printed in the U.S.A.
THE DYING EARTH

1. TURJAN OF MIIR



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 pityЧa 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."