"Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

any less impossible.
The frail, leafless thing had grown so large that its top was out of sight beyond the clouds
that hung motionless in the gray sky. Its trunk was as wide as a castle tower from a fairy story,
a massive cylinder of rough bark that seemed to extend as far downward as it did up, running
smoothly down the side of the bomb crater, vanishing into the soil at the bottom with no trace of
roots.
He had walked around the tree and could make no sense of it. He had walked away from the tree,
hoping to find an angle from which he could gauge its height, but that had not assisted his
understanding either. No matter how far he stumbled back across the featureless plain, the tree
still stretched beyond the cloud ceiling. And always, whether he wanted to or not, he found
himself returning to the tree again. Not only was there nothing else to move toward, but the world
itself seemed somehow curved, so that no matter which direction he took, eventually he found
himself heading back toward the monumental trunk.
He sat with his back against it for a while and tried to sleep. Sleep would not come, but
stubbornly he kept his eyes closed anyway. He was not happy with the puzzles set before him. He
had been struck by an exploding shell. The war and everyone in it seemed to have vanished,
although a conflict of that size should have been a rather difficult thing to misplace. The light
had not changed in this place since he had come here, although it must have been hours since the
explosion. And the only other thing in the world was an immense, impossible vegetable.
He prayed that when he opened his eyes again, he would either find himself in some sort of
respectable afterlife or returned to the familiar misery of the trenches with Mullet and Finch and
the rest of the platoon. When the prayer had ended, he still did not risk a look, determined to
give God--or Whoever--enough time to put things right. He sat, doing his best to ignore the band
of pain across the back of his head, letting the silence seep into him as he waited for normality
to reassert itself. At last, he opened his eyes.
Mist, mud, and that immense, damnable tree. Nothing had changed.
Paul sighed deeply and stood up. He did not remember much about his life before the war, and
at this moment even the immediate past was dim, but he did remember that there had been a certain
kind of story in which an impossible thing happened, and once that impossible thing had proved
that it was not going to un-happen again, there was only one course of action left: the impossible
thing must be treated as a possible thing.
What did you do with an unavoidable tree that grew up into the sky beyond the clouds? You
climbed it.


It was not as difficult as he had expected. Although no branches jutted from the trunk until just
below the belly of the clouds, the very size of the tree helped him; the bark was pitted and
cracked like the skin of some immense serpent, providing excellent toeholds and handholds. Some of
the bumps were big enough to sit on, allowing him to catch his breath in relative safety and
comfort.
But still it was not easy. Although it was hard to tell in that timeless, sunless place, he
felt he had been climbing for at least half a day when he reached the first branch. It was as
broad as a country road, bending up and away; where it, too, vanished into the clouds, he could
see the first faint shapes of leaves.
Paul lay down where the branch met the trunk and tried to sleep, but though he was very tired,
sleep still would not come. When he had rested for a while, he got up and resumed climbing.
After a while the air grew cooler, and he began to feel the wet touch of clouds. The sky


file:///F|/rah/Tad%20Williams/Otherland%201%20-%20City%20of%20Golden%20Shadow.txt (6 of 368) [8/28/03 12:39:49 AM]