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

But the cable was a sort of pampas trail; to go up it was
as easy as to go down, and both were easy indeed. Its many
strands provided me with a thousand holds, and I scrambled
up like a long-haunched little beast, a hare bounding
along a log.
Soon the cable reached a spar, the yard holding the lower
main topsail. I sprang from it to another, slimmer, cable;
and from it to a third. When I mounted to the spar that
held it, I found I was mounting no longer; the whisper of
_down_ was silent, and the grayish-brown hull of the ship
simply drifted, somewhere near the limit of my vision.
Beyond my head, bank after bank of silver sails rose still,
apparently as endless as before I had mounted into the
rigging. To right and left, the masts of other decks diverged
like the tines of a birding arrow--or rather, like row upon
row of such arrows, for there were still more masts behind
those nearest me, masts separated by tens of leagues at
least. Like the fingers of the Increate they pointed to the
ends of the universe, their topmost starsails no more than
flecks of gleaming tinsel lost among the glittering stars.
From such a place I might have cast the coffer (as I had
thought to do) into the waste, to be found, perhaps, by
someone of another race, if the Increate willed it.
Two things restrained me, the first less a thought than a
memory, the memory of my first resolve, made when I
wrote and all speculations about the ships of the Hierodules
were new to me, to wait until our vessel had
penetrated the fabric of time. I had already entrusted the
initial manuscript of my account to Master Ultan's library,
where it would endure no longer than our Urth herself.
This copy I had (at first) intended for another creation;
so that even if I failed the great trial that lay before me, I
would have succeeded in sending a part of our world--no
matter how trifling a part--beyond the pales of the universe.
Now I looked at the stars, at suns so remote that their
circling planets were invisible, though some might be
larger than Serenus; and at whole swirls of stars so remote
that their teeming billions appeared to be a single star. And
I marveled to recall that all this had seemed too small for
my ambition, and wondered whether it had grown (though
the mystes declare it no longer grows) or I had.
The second was not truly of thought either, perhaps;
only instinct and an overmastering desire: I wanted to
mount to the top. To defend my resolution, I might say that
I knew no such opportunity might come again, that it
scarcely accorded with my office to settle for less than
common seamen achieved whenever their duties demanded it, and so on.
All these would be rationalizations--the thing itself was
glorious. For years I had known joy in nothing but victories,
and now I felt myself a boy again. When I had wished