"Chalker, Jack L - Changewinds 2 - Riders of the Winds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

Jack L Chalker - RIDERS OF THE WINDSRIDERS OF THE WINDS
Copyright © 1988 by Jack L. Chalker.
e-book ver. 1.0

For Ted Cogswell, and Polly Freas, and Bea Mahaffey, and Alice "Tip" Sheldon,
and too many other old friends who left this outplane while I was writing this.
I owe you all, but too many of you are
missing when I return to this reality, and contrary to
natural law, there are far too many vacuums where
once special brightness dwelt.


PROLOGUE
The Shape of Things

When the changewinds blow, out from the Seat of Probability and across the
worlds they themselves created, they are capricious things, at once random and
consistent, yet they obey their own spectral meteorology.
The Changewinds' breath touched the formative Earth when it was but a cooling
mass of molten rock, its own formation caused by a previous storm hitting in the
void, and within that mass was sufficient moisture to cause the great clouds
formed from condensation. The winds had less to draw them, then, so they let it
alone for thousands of years. It was one hell of a rainstorm.
The Changewinds returned to touch the new Earth when it was still soup, and the
conditions arose for the joining of acids and proteins just so. It was not
planned that way; it simply had to happen someplace under the laws of
probability, which are the only laws the Changewinds recognize.
Later Changewinds, far weakened this far from the Seat of their origin, none the
less gently caressed the still-developing mass sufficient to create the early
creatures of the sea and establish the developmental pattern that led in the end
to the vast jungles and the reign of great reptiles and amphibians. Another,
perhaps stronger, storm dismissed them as coldly and capriciously as they had
been made masters of the world, and allowed for the rise of mammals.
Why did the ape line develop better than the rest? Why did one branch develop
intelligence and tools and eventually civilization of sorts? Well, why not? It
might as well have been them as anything else. And the same sort of thing had
happened on a large number of probable worlds between the Earth we know and the
Seat, creating both the same sorts of creatures and very different ones. Our
world is far from the Seat, and younger; the others developed earlier, as ones
beyond developed later than we, but those vast civilizations and worlds which
developed in between created a buffer between the younger worlds and the Seat,
increasingly dense, protecting our world as mountains and jet streams and seas
and air masses protect us from weather, absorbing much of the energy.
A great storm moves across the land wreaking havoc as it comes, until it hits
the mountains, the great, impressive barriers of nature. Crossing those
mountains requires ten, a hundred, a thousand times the energy of crossing vast
plains and oceans. A stubborn, particularly violent storm might make it, but if
it does it will be so weakened that it will be quite ordinary to those living on
the far side of the range. Or it might be diverted, attempting to go around the
mountain barriers, and hitting elsewhere or spending itself in a long, futile