"Man Who Loved The Faioli, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

Roger Zelazny. The Man Who Loved the Faioli

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It is the story of John Auden and the Faioli, and no one knows it
better than I. Listen--

It happened on that evening, as he strolled (for there was no reason
not to stroll) in his favorite places in the whole world, that he saw the
Faioli near the Canyon of the Dead, seated on a rock, her wings of light
flickering, flickering, flickering and then gone, until it appeared that a
human girl was sitting there, dressed all in white and weeping, with long
black tresses coiled about her waist.

He approached her through the terrible light from the dying, half-dead
sun, in which human eyes could not distinguish distances nor grasp
perspectives properly (though his could), and he lay his right hand upon her
shoulder and spoke a word of greeting and of comfort.

It was as if he did not exist, however. She continued to weep,
streaking with silver her cheeks the color of snow or a bone. Her almond
eyes looked forward as though they saw through him, and her long fingernails
dug into the flesh of her palm, though no blood was drawn.

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the
Faioli--that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are
formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself,
John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for
a time.

The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his
death--those rare men who still died--and to live with such a man for that
final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is
possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of
death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man
accepts it--no, seeks it--with desire and grace, for such is the power of
the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired
after such knowledge.

John Auden considered his life and his death, the conditions of the
world upon which he stood, the nature of his stewardship and his curse and
the Faioli--who was the loveliest creature he had ever seen in all of his
four hundred thousand days of existence--and he touched the place beneath
his left armpit which activated the necessary mechanism to make him live
again.

The creature stiffened beneath his touch, for suddenly it was flesh,
his touch, and flesh, warm and woman-filled, that he was touching, now that
the last sensations of life had returned to him. He knew that his touch had
become the touch of a man once more.