"John Varley - Gaea 2 - Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

into ravings and fantasy, then fell silent forever. But she could not know how her own aging body
would play her false. No human suddenly throttled by her own hands could have been more surprised
than Gaea when her provincial brains began to resist her will.
Three million years of supremacy had ill-prepared Gaea for the arts of compromise. Perhaps
she could have lived in peace with her satellite brains had she been willing to listen to their
grievances. On the other hand, two of her regions were insane, and another so darkly malevolent
that he might as well have been. For a hundred years the great wheel of Gaea vibrated with the
stresses of war. Those epic battles came close to destroying her and resulted in huge loss of life
among her peoples, who were as helpless as any Hindu before the Gods of Vedic myth.
No titanic figures strode the curve of Gaea's wheel, throwing thunderbolts and mountains. The
Gods in this struggle were the lands themselves. Reason vanished as the ground opened and fires
fell from the spokes. Civilizations a hundred thousand years old were swept away without trace,
and others fell into savagery.
Gaea's twelve regions were too headstrong, too unreliable to unite against her. Her most
faithful ally was the land of Hyperion; her implacable enemy, Oceanus. They were adjacent
territories. Both were devastated before the war became an armed truce.
But revolt and war were not to be enough disgrace for an elderly God; elsewhere worse
disaster approached. In the wink of an eye the airwaves were flooded with the most astonishing
noises. At first she thought it was a new symptom of encroaching dotage. Surely she had invented
these impossible voices from space with names like Lowell Thomas, Fred Allen, and the Cisco Kid.
But she eventually caught on to the trick. She became an avid listener. Had there been mail
service to Earth she would have sent in Ovaltine labels for magic decoder rings. She loved Fibber
McGee and was a faithful fan of Amos and Andy.
Television hit her as hard as talkies had stunned audiences in the late 1920's. As in the
early days of radio, for many years most television was of American origin, and it was these
programs she liked best. She followed the exploits of Lucy and Ricky and had all the answers to
The $64,000 Question, which she was scandalized to discover was rigged. She watched everything,
something she suspected not even the producers of many of the shows did.
There were movies and there was news. In the electronic explosion of the eighties and
nineties there was much more as entire libraries were transmitted. But by that time her studies of


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human culture were more than academic. Watching Neil Armstrong's performance confirmed something
she had long suspected. Humans would come calling by and by.
She began preparing to meet them. The outlook was not good. They were a warlike breed,
possessed of weapons that could vaporize her. They could not be expected to take lightly the
presence of a 1,300 kilometer living wheel-God in "their" solar system. She recalled Orson
Welles's Halloween broadcast of 1938. She remembered This Island Earth and I Married a Monster
from Outer Space.
All her planning came to naught when Oceanus, ever eager for a chance to sabotage Gaea in any
way he could, destroyed DSV Ringmaster, the first ship to reach her. But the humans failed to
fulfill her worst expectations. The second ship, though armed and ready to destroy her, stayed its
hand long enough for explanations to be made. In this Gaea was aided by the surviving members of
the first expedition. An embassy was established, and everyone politely ignored the ship which
took station at a safe distance, never to leave her neighborhood again. She did not worry about
it. She had no intention of ever provoking it to loose its deadly cargo, and Oceanus's range of
mischief was limited.