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

falling head downward--with the speed of my initial leap.
Below me, or at least in the direction of my feet, the ship
seemed a dwindling continent of silver, her black masts
and spars as slender as the horns of crickets. Around me,
the stars burned unchecked, blazing with splendor never
seen on Urth. For a moment, not because my wits were
working but because they were not, I looked for her; she
would be green, I thought, like green Lune, but tipped with
white where the ice-fields closed upon our chilled lands. I
could not find her, nor even the crimson-shot orange disk
of the old sun.
Then I realized I had been looking in the wrong place. If
Urth was visible at all, Urth would be astern. I looked
there and saw, not our Urth, but a growing, spinning,
swirling vortex of fuligin, the color that is darker than
black. It was like some vast eddy or whirlpool of emptiness;
but circling it was a circle of colored light, as though a
billion billion stars were dancing.
Then I knew the miracle had passed without my notice,
had passed as I copied out some stodgy sentence about
Master Gurloes or the Ascian War. We had penetrated the
fabric of time, and the fuligin vortex marked the end of the
universe.
Or its beginning. If its beginning, then that shimmering
ring of stars was the scattering of the young suns, and the
only truly magical ring this universe would ever know.
Hailing them, I shouted for joy, though no one heard my
voice but the Increate and me.
I drew my cloak to me and pulled the leaden coffer from
it; and I held the coffer above my head in both my hands;
and I cast it, cheering as I cast it, out of my unseen cloak of
air, out of the purlieu of the ship, out of the universe that
the coffer and I had known, and into the new creation as
final offering from the old.
At once my destiny seized me and flung me back. Not
straight downward toward the part of the deck I had left,
which might well have killed me, but down and forward, so
that I saw the mastheads racing by me. I craned my neck to
see the next; it was the last. Had I been an ell or two to the
right, I might have been brained by the very tip of the
mast. Instead I flashed between its final extension and the
starsail yard, with the buntlines far out of reach. I had
outraced the ship.
Enormously distant and at a different angle altogether,
another of the uncountable masts appeared. Sails sprouted
from it like the leaves on a tree; and they were not the now
familiar rectangular sails, but triangular ones. For a time, it
seemed I would outrace this mast too, and then that I
would strike it. Frantically, I clutched at the flying jib stay.
Around it I swung like a flag in a changing wind. I clung