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

sometimes swam the void, and the winged being I had
glimpsed in Father Inire's book flew there.
Now I learned what I had never really known before:
that all these ships and great beings are only a single
handful of seed scattered over a desert, which remains
when the sowing is done as empty as ever. I would have
turned and limped back to my cabin, if I had not realized
that when I reached it my pride would force me out again.
At last I approached the faint descending gossamers of
the rigging, cables that sometimes caught the starlight,
sometimes vanished in the darkness or against the towering
bank of silver that was the top-hamper of the deck
beyond. Small though they appeared, each cable was
thicker than the great column's of our cathedral.
I had worn a cloak of wool as well as my cloak of air; now
I knotted the hem about my waist, making a sort of bag or
pack into which I put the coffer. Gathering all my strength
into my good leg, I leaped.
Because I felt my whole being but a tissue of feathers, I
had supposed I would rise slowly, floating upward as I had
been told sailors floated in the rigging. It was not so. I
leaped as swiftly and perhaps more swiftly than anyone
here on Ushas, but I did not slow, as such a leaper begins to
slow almost at once. The first speed of my leap endured
unabated--up and up I shot, and the feeling was wonderful
and terrifying.
Soon the terror grew because I could not hold myself as I
wished; my feet lifted of their own accord until I leaped
half sidewise, and at last spun through the emptiness like a
sword tossed aloft in the moment of victory.
A shining cable flashed by, just outside my reach. I heard
a strangled cry, and only afterward realized it had come
from my own throat. A second cable shone ahead. Whether
I willed it or not, I rushed at it as I might have rushed upon
an enemy, caught it, and held it, though the effort nearly
wrenched my arms out of their sockets, and the leaden
coffer--which shot past my head--almost strangled me
with my own cloak. Clamping my legs around the icy cable,
I managed to catch my breath.
Many abuattes roamed the gardens of the House Absolute,
and because the lower servants (ditchers, porters, and
the like) occasionally trapped them for the pot, they were
wary of men. I often watched and envied them as they ran
up some trunk without falling--and, indeed, seemingly
without knowledge of the aching hunger of Urth at all.
Now I had myself become such an animal. The faintest tug
from the ship told me that downward lay toward the
spreading deck, but it was less than the memory of a
memory: once, perhaps, I had fallen, somehow. I recalled
recollecting that fall.