"Jack Williamson - Brother to Demons, Brother to Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

At the school their fellow students were all bored and sullen. Their lessons were about all the
worlds of the Thearchy except Andoranda V, the only one they could ever expect to see. They
laughed at him and Buglet when they spoke of the MultimanтАФand sometimes jeered at them for
being the agent's pets.
Davey asked the preman teachers about the Creators and the Multiman, but all they knew
came from the words in the Book of Belthar, which the school chaplain droned through his nose
every morning before their studies began.
With pocket money now for tacos and rice when they were tired of the strange foods at the
agency, or a cactus ice at the sidewalk cafe, they made more preman friends in town. The wisest,
people said, was La China.
She was El Yaqui's wife, strange-odored, silent and black and nearly too fat to move.
Shapeless in a faded blanket, she sat behind her ancient cash machine at the wide door of the
trading post, taking money for meals and beer and mescal, for stuff off the shelves, for the girls
upstairs. Her dark Asian eyes saw everything, but when Davey asked what she knew about the
Multiman, her only answer was a sleepy smile.
"Maybe he's only a story," Buglet decided at last. "Maybe we'll have to let them send us off to
that awful world where no life grows."
"My mother believed," Davey always insisted. "I won't give up." One morning on their way to
school they found a strange skimmer on the plaza beside the chapel of Thar. Branded with a blue
bear inside the triple triangle, it had brought six gray-robed monks of the Polarian order, who
scattered over the reservation to ask for preman antiques and to look for preman ruins. Their dean
came to the school.
"The gates are closed at Prince Quelf's dam." He was a short fat man who kept licking his lips
as if his words had a good taste. "The lake will be rising fast. We want to gather all the preman
artifacts we can before the water gets here. If you know of any old records or tools or weapons, or
where any old buildings stood, please help us preserve them for history."
"I think they're looking for the Multiman," Buglet whispered to Davey. "Don't tell them
anything."
Meeting that night in the adobe town hall, the senate voted to let the monks explore Creation
Mesa, which legend said had been the actual birthplace of the trumen and the gods. Though El
Yaqui had always been as silent as his wife about the Multiman, he called softly next morning as
Davey was passing, "Venga, muchacho!тАЭ
El Yaqui was brown as the earth, bald as a pebble, and quick as a spider. Coming late to the
reservation from far high mountains where the church had left them alone, his people had brought
strange words and strange things. In the hungry times before the goddess came he had been
generous to Davey and Buglet, with bowls of milk and bits of sun-dried goat meat, and he still
liked to share his desert lore and his peyote buttons on fiesta days. Breathing fast, Davey fol-
lowed him down the stairs behind the bar and back through the stale stinks of spilled beer and
mescal to a serape hanging on the wall.
"1 think you are now ready to become a man." Hard brown fingers squeezed his arm, as if that
had been the test. "You have asked about the Multiman. Really, I know nothingтАФthere was no
Multiman in the dry sierra from which my people came. Yet there are certain ancient artifacts I
must show you before the monks take them."
Behind the faded serape was a tiny room carved out of raw earth. A preman book with torn
and yellowed pages lay open on a cloth-covered box, and a tiny flame burned beneath the image
of an agonized man nailed to a cross.
"The book tells of a preman god." El Yaqui knelt before it, his brown hand jumping like a
spider. "The son of the god was killed. The book promises that he will return to aid his true
believers. I once thought that perhaps it foretold the Multiman's awakening."
"Do youтАФ" The musty little pit seemed suddenly very cold, and Davey found himself