"Gene Wolfe - Endangered Species" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

The curve of Lune lay just visible in the east, sending
streamers of virescence toward him in a silent flood, spumed
and uncanny. Silhouetted against that moss-green light, the
city on the eastern bank seemed less dead than sleeping.
Its lowers were black, but their sightless windows, thus il-
luminated from behind, appeared to betray a faint radiance,
as though hecatonchires roved the gloomy corridors and
deserted rooms, their thousand fingers smeared with noc-
toluscence to light their way.

He looked to the west just in time to see a pair of gleam-
ing eyes sink into the water with a scarcely perceptible plash.
For the space of a dozen breaths he stared at the spot, but
there was nothing more to see. He dashed to starboard
again, to what was now the eastern side of the anchored
boat, imagining that some devious adversary had swum un-
der or around it to take him by surprise; Gyoll slipped past
unruffled.

To port, the shadow of the hull lay long across the glassy
river, though he could easily have touched the water with
his hands. No skiff or shallop launched from the silent
shore.
Downriver, the ruined city appeared to stretch away to
infinity, as though Urth were a level plain occupying the
whole of space, and the whole of Urth were filled with
crumbling walls and tilted pillars. A night bird circled over-
head, stooped at the water, and did not rise.

Upriver, the cookfires and grease lamps of living Nessus
lent no glow to the sky. The river seemed the only living
thing in a city of death; and for an instant the stranger was
seized by the conviction that cold Gyoll itself was dead, that
the sodden sticks and bits of excrement it carried were
somehow swimming, that they were outward bound on
some unending voyage to dissolution.

He was about to turn away when he noticed what ap-
peared to be a human form drifting toward him with a
scarcely discernible motion. He watched it fascinated and
unbelieving, as sparrows are said to watch the golden snake
called soporor.

It came nearer. In the green moonlight, its hair looked
colorless, its skin berylline. He saw that it was in fact human,
and that it floated face downward.

One outstretched hand touched the floating anchor cable
as if it wished to climb aboard. Momentarily, the hemp re-