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

"More than anything else I have ever known," he said.

And she sighed, and he found her lips once again.

They breakfasted, and that day they walked in the Valley of the Bones.
He could not distinguish distances nor grasp perspectives properly, and she
could not see anything that had been living and now was dead. So, of course,
as they sat there on a shelf of stone, his arm around her shoulders, he
pointed out to her the rocket which had just come down from out of the sky,
and she squinted after his gesture. He indicated the robots, which had begun
unloading the remains of the dead of many world from the hold of the ship,
and she cocked her head to one side and stared ahead, but she did not really
see what he was talking about.

Even when one of the robots lumbered up to him and held out the board
containing the receipt and the stylus, and as he signed the receipt for the
bodies received, she did not see or understand what it was that was
occurring.

In the days that followed, his life took upon it a dreamlike quality,
filled with the pleasure of Sythia and shot through with certain inevitable
streaks of pain. Often, she saw him wince, and she asked him concerning his
expressions.

And always he would laugh and say, "Pleasure and pain are near to one
another," or some thing such as that.

And as the days wore on, she came to prepare the meals and to rub his
shoulders and mix his drinks and to recite to him certain pieces of poetry
he had somehow once come to love.

A month. A month, he knew, and it would come to an end. The Faioli,
whatever they were, paid for the life that they took with the pleasures of
the flesh. They always knew when a man's death was near at hand. And in this
sense, they always gave more than they received. The life was fleeing
anyway, and they enhanced it before they took it away with them, to nourish
themselves most likely, price of the things that they'd given.

Sythia was mother-of-pearl, and her body was alternately cold and warm
to his caresses, and her mouth was a tiny flame, igniting wherever it
touched, with its teeth like needles and its tongue like the heart of a
flower. And so he came to know the thing called love for the Faioli called
Sythia.

Nothing really happened beyond the loving. He knew that she wanted him,
to use him ultimately, and he was perhaps the only man in the universe able
to gull one of her kind. His was the perfect defense against life and
against death. Now that he was human and alive, he often wept when he
considered it.