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

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
all the things you wished for in the world?"

"I would--try to--keep it," it said, red lights blinking about its
dome, before it turned and lumbered off, across the Great Graveyard.

"Yes," said John Auden aloud, "but this thing cannot be done."

Sythia did not understand him, and on that thirty-first day they
returned to that place where he had lived for a month and he felt the fear
of death, strong, so strong, come upon him.

She was more exquisite that ever before, but he feared this final
encounter.

"I love you," he said finally, for it was a thing he had never said
before, and she stroked his brow and kissed it.

"I know," she told him, "and your time is almost at hand, to love me
completely. Before the final act of love, my John Auden, tell me a thing:
What is it that sets you apart? Why is it that you know so much more of
things-that-are-not-life than mortal man should know? How was it that you
approached me on that first night without my knowing it?"

"It is because I am already dead," he told her. "Can't you see it when
you look into my eyes? Do you not feel it, as a certain special chill,
whenever I touch you? I came here rather than sleep the cold sleep, which
would have me to be in a thing like death anyhow, an oblivion wherein I
would not even know I was waiting, waiting for the cure which might never
happen, the cure for one of the very last fatal diseases remaining in the
universe, the disease which now leaves me only small time of life."

"I do not understand," she said.

"Kiss me and forget it," he told her. "It is better this way. There
will doubtless never be a cure, for some things remain always dark, and I
have surely been forgotten. You must have sensed the death upon me, when I
restored my humanity, for such is the nature of your kind. I did it to enjoy
you, knowing you to be of the Faioli. So have your pleasure of me now, and
know that I share it. I welcome thee. I have courted thee all the days of my
life, unknowing."

But she was curious and asked him (using the familiar for the first
time), "How then dost thou achieve this balance between life and
that-which-is-not-life, this thing which keeps thee unconscious yet
unalive?"

"There are controls set within this body I happen, unfortunately, to
occupy. To touch this place beneath my left armpit will cause my lungs to