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

He had more than a month to live.

He had maybe three or four.

This month, therefore, was a price he'd willingly pay for what it was
that the Faioli offered.

Sythia racked his body and drained from it every drop of pleasure
contained within his tired nerve cells. She turned him into a flame, an
iceberg, a little boy, an old man. When they were together, his feelings
were such that he considered the _consolamentum_ as a thing he might really
accept at the end of the month, which was drawing near. Why not? He knew she
had filled his mind with her presence, on purpose. But what more did
existence hold for him? This creature from beyond the stars had brought him
every single thing a man could desire. She had baptized him with passion and
confirmed him with the quietude which follows after. Perhaps the final
oblivion of her final kiss were best after all.

He seized her and drew her to him. She did not understand him, but she
responded.

He loved her for it, and this was almost his end.

There is a thing called disease that battens upon all living things,
and he had known it beyond the scope of all living men. She could not
understand, woman-thing who had known only of life.

So he never tried to tell her, though with each day the taste of her
kisses grew stronger and saltier and each seemed to him a strengthening
shadow, darker and darker, stronger and heavier, of that one thing which he
now knew he desired most.

And the day would come. And come it did.

He held her and caressed her, and the calendars of all his days fell
about them.

He knew, as he abandoned himself to her ploys and the glories of her
mouth, her breasts, that he had been ensnared, as had all men who had known
them, by the power of the Faioli. Their strength was their weakness. They
were the ultimate in Woman. By their frailty they begat the desire to
please. He wanted to merge himself with the pale landscape of her body, to
pass within the circles of her eyes and never depart.

He had lost, he knew. For as the days had vanished about him, he had
weakened. He was barely able to scrawl his name upon the receipt proffered
him by the robot who had lumbered toward him, crushing ribcages and cracking
skulls with each terrific step. Briefly, he envied the thing. Sexless,
passionless, totally devoted to duty. Before he dismissed it, he asked it,
"What would you do if you had desire and you met with a thing that gave you