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

quivering and voiceless with awe. "Do you believe?"
El Yaqui stood up slowly.
"I believe in the stargods," he said. "I have seen them and felt their power."
"Then whyтАФ" Davey frowned at his hard, dark face, mysterious in the flicker of the candle.
"Why do you keep these things?"
"Because they were my father's," El Yaqui said. "A powerful sorcerer and a very wise man.
He knew the language of this book, and he used to read the story of the tortured god to me. He
could take an owl's shape to watch the churchmen, and a coyote's shape to escape them. He
expected the old god's forsaken son to return and rescue the premen. But he is dead. The waters
will be rising over Redrock. The monks of Polaris have come to take the cross and the book for
their museum of preman heresies."
Bending over, he blew out the candle.
Buglet was waiting at a sidewalk table under La China's sleepy smile when Davey came out of
the bar. She looked at him, and her bright face clouded.
"Davey, I'm afraid." Her small voice quivered. "I'm afraid of Andoranda V."
 "I think we must learn all we can," he told her as they walked on to school. "All about the
trumen and all about those worlds that are not for us. If there is no Multiman, I think we must
plan to leave the reservation and hide among the trumen."
She stopped to stare at him, eyes round and huge and dark.
"I know the penalty," he told her. "But no penalty could be quite so bad as Andoranda V."
They learned all they could at school, though term by term their teachers seemed more and
more stupid and indifferent, their fellow students less and less concerned with anything except
sex and drugs and vandalism. They heard that the tunnels were flowing, heard that water was
already deep in the lower canyons, heard that their camp was ready on Andoranda V. They saw
the new square mountain rising, far off in the south, which San Seven said was to be the founda-
tion for Prince Quelf's palace. They listened to the fat gray Polarian dean, who sometimes dined
at the agency and talked about the excavations on Creation Mesa.
Davey kept hoping the monks would uncover some hint that the Multiman was real, but the
digging went slowly. There was only legend to tell where the old labs had stood, and the preman
workers came only when they needed money for mescal and La China's girls. All they had found
beneath the barren dunes and the desert brush was the story of Belthar's attack from space,
written in buried craters and glassy flows of lava. Davey's last spark of hope was nearly dead,
when Buglet had her dream of the Creation.

Unfolding like some desert flower, Buglet had begun to call herself Jondarc after the heroine
of a tragic preman legend she had heard from La China's girls. Taller that year than Davey, with
straight black hair and yellow-gray eyes, she was suddenly alluring. Half the boys in school were
in hot pursuit, and Davey was haunted with a secret dread that some churchman might see her
and take her away for Belthar or himself.
Moody that morning, she met him with only a smile. They walked in silence down the hill
from the agency and along the muddy road toward the school. She was deaf to the whistles of two
preman boys setting the sidewalk tables for La China. Unaware of the black-starred skimmer that
dived by them, gray-robed monk staring. Blind to the new arroyo that rain had cut in the trail
ahead.
"Don't brood, Bug." He caught her arm to steer her past the ditch and trembled from the
contact. "The lake's still miles away. We may have months yet to find something, though I don't
know whatтАФ"
"Maybe I do."
He heard the hope in her voice and then saw that she was not despondent, but full of some
confused elation. They had come to the plaza, which was stacked with big yellow plastic shipping