"Love Is AnImaginary Number" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

Or should I beat a circuitous route from here to some distant Other,
hoping to elude them completely?

My questions answered themselves.

There came a clatter of hoofs at my back, and a knight appeared: he was
mounted upon a tall, proud steed; he wore burnished armor; upon his shield
was set a cross of red.

"You have come far enough," he said. "Draw rein!"

The blade he bore upraised was a wicked and gleaming weapon, until I
transformed it into a serpent. He dropped it then, and it slithered off into
the underbrush.

"You were saying...?"

"Why don't you give up?" he asked. "Join us, or quit trying?"

"Why don't _you_ give up? Quit them and join with me? We could change
many times and places together. You have the ability, and the training..."

By then he was close enough to lunge, in an attempt to unhorse me with
the edge of his shield.

I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.

"Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!" he gasped.

"All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you
speak, not the final results."

"Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good
are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not
change the men themselves?"

"Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly," I said, and I
dismounted and moved to his side. "All that your kind seek is a perpetual
Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do."

I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but
the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once
again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.

I remounted and rode on.

After a time, there came again the sound of hoofs at my back.

I spoke another word, which mounted me upon a sleek unicorn, to move at