"Wolfe, Gene - The Urth Of The New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

(which proved no barrier to me) and scratched the side of
his tiny mouth. He turned his head just as a dog would
have, and I felt small ears beneath the fur.
Behind me, someone said, "Cute, ain't it?" and I turned
to look. It was Purn, the grinning sailor.
I answered, "He seems harmless enough."
"Most are." Purn hesitated. "Only most die and drift
off. We only see a few of 'em, that's what they say."
"Gunnie calls them apports," I remarked, "and I've
been thinking about that. The sails bring them, don't
they?"
Purn nodded absently and stretched a finger of his own
through the barrier to tickle the shaggy creature.
"Adjacent sails must be like two large mirrors. They're
curved, so somewhere--in fact, in various places--they
must be parallel, and the starlight shines on them."
Purn nodded again. "That's what makes the ship go, as
the skipper said when they asked about the wench."
"I once knew a man called Hethor who summoned
deadly things to serve him. And I was told by one called
Vodalus--Vodalus was not to be trusted, I'll admit--that
Hethor used mirrors to bring them. I've a friend who
works mirror spells too, though his are not evil. Hethor
had been a hand on a ship like this."
That captured Purn's attention. He withdrew his finger
and turned to face me. "You know her name?" he asked.
"The name of his ship? No, I don't think he ever
mentioned it. Wait... He said he'd been on several.
'Long I signed on the silver-sailed ships, the hundred-masted
whose masts reached out to touch the stars."'
"Ah." Purn nodded. "Some say there's only one. That's
something I wonder about, sometimes."
"Surely there must be many. Even when I was a boy,
people told me of them, the ships of the cacogens putting
into the Port of Lune."
"Where's that?"
"Lune? It's the moon of my world, the moon of Urth."
"That was small stuff, then," Purn told me. "Tenders
and launches and so forth. Nobody never said there wasn't
a lot of little stuff shuttling around between the various
worlds of the various suns. Only this ship here and the
other ones like it, allowing that there's more than the one,
they don't come in so close, generally. They can do it all
right, but it's a tricky business. Then too, there's a good bit
of rock whizzing around, close in to a sun, usually."
The white-haired Idas appeared carrying a collection of
tools. "_Hello!_" he called, and I waved to him.
"I ought to get busy," Purn muttered. "Me and that one
are supposed to be taking care of 'em. I was just looking
around to be sure they were all right when I saw you, uh,