"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 06 - The Stars Asunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

course of five Mageworlds novels we had scarcely visited the Mageworlds themselves at all. Beka
Rosselin-Metadi and Nyls Jessan touched ground briefly on Raamet and Ninglin and Eraasi; Errec
Ransome was held prisoner for a short while on Cracanth; but little more than that.
And our characters, by and large, were not going to give us any sympathy when we felt guilty.
From the viewpoint of the civilized galaxy-as the worlds which later became the Republic and its allies
liked to think of themselves-the Mageworlds were a menace, home to a faceless enemy.
"The Mageworlds" was not even the raiders' own name for their place of origin. The name they
used, most of the time, was simply "the homeworlds." Sometimes they, or the more politically aware
among their adversaries, would call themselves "Eraasians," from the dominant planet in their loose
confederation.
Even more than the Mageworlds' attempts at conquest, the metaphysical differences between the
two cultures set them at odds. In the civilized galaxy, those who worked with and through the power
inherent in the universe called themselves Adepts. Their philosophy favored individual action over
collective effort, and they believed in riding the natural flow of power in the universe and letting that flow
add to their own strengths.
On their own worlds, the Adepts were historically regarded with both distrust and superstitious
awe. As a consequence, they became, as a group, inclined toward secrecy and the protection of their
own. Tradition set the Adepts apart from formal involvement in political life; during certain periods,
however, their informal participation was considerable. The years during and immediately after the First
Magewar were especially noteworthy in this regard.
The Mages, as they referred to themselves (their enemies then expanded the term to cover an
entire society, and not merely a comparative few of its members), were integrated into the public life of
their worlds as the more solitary Adepts never were. Believing in group action and in the combination of
forces toward a single effort, the Mages regarded the power resident in the universe as something to be
manipulated and worked with directly. For the Adepts, on the other hand, actually making changes in the
flow of power, or attempting to impose a pattern on that flow, was regarded as nothing less than an
abomination-"sorcery," as Llannat Hyfid describes it when she first feels it in action on Darvell;
"Magework and dark sorcery."
Another philosophical dividing point between the two cultures came on the question of luck. The
philosophy of the Adepts, in its strictest form, holds that there is no such thing as luck at all, only the
natural flow of power in the universe. Those people who are spoken of by others as "lucky" are regarded
by the Adepts as having an innate sense of this power flow, of where it goes and of when and how it is
about to change. Even among people who believe in luck in its more casual sense, there is no feeling that
luck is subject to conscious manipulation.
The Mages, on the other hand, view luck as something real in itself, and inextricably bound up
with human life. Grand Admiral sus-Airaalin of the Mageworlds Resurgency speaks of Beka
Rosselin-Metadi as a "luck-maker"; something of the same quality, in the Mages' view, also attaches to
her father, Jos Metadi, "whose luck two generations of Magelords had tried in vain to break." The forces
of life and luck together make up the eiran, perceived by working Mages as a network of silver cords.
Attempts on a Mage-Circle's part to untangle the eiran of a particular place, or to bring them into a more
pleasing pattern, are often experienced by Adepts as unnatural changes or damage to the natural flow of
power.
In the aftermath of the First Magewar, these philosophical differences-and, of course, the
atrocities committed by the Mageworlders on Ilarna and Sapne and Entibor-almost proved fatal to the
Eraasian worlds. Driven by a need for security and a desire for revenge, the military forces of the
victorious Republic did their best to reduce Eraasian industrial capacity below the level necessary to
wage interstellar war. At the same time, Errec Ransome and his Adepts strove to break the
Mage-Circles and eliminate their practices from the civilized galaxy. The combined result was not so
much a period of occupation and pacification as it was-to quote the Ilarnan scholar Vinhalyn, who
observed the process as a young officer with the Republic's Space Force-"the systematic destruction of a