"David Zindell - Neverness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on
Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library
Resources.

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents
are either the product of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the
intent of either the author or publisher.

Journeymen die

On Old Earth, the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and
they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was
Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied


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inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her
belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and
the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth
and the heavens In six days and who called forth the birds and the
beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess
of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is,
life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the
Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps
unknowable: the ultimate mystery remains.

from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord
Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the
Ineffable Flame

There Is infinite hope, but not for Man. -Franz Kalka, Holocaust Century
Fabulist

Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we
sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man-what was left
of man-was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the
seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder
Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of
my birth and death.

I call her Neverness. The founders of our Order, so the Timekeeper once
told me, having discovered a neighborhood of space where the pathways
through the manifold twist and loop together like a hard knot of string,
decided to build our city on a nearby planet named Icefall. Because such
knots of space were once thought to be rare or nonexistent-the cantors
now call them thickspace-our first Timekeeper declared that we could