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

culture cognate to ours, yet unimaginably alien."
III. Concerning the Sundering of the Galaxy

A great expanse of starless space separates the Mageworlds from the rest of the galaxy. In
Mageworlds legend, this interstellar gap was the product of the Sundering of the Galaxy, a catastrophic
event with theological or metaphysical roots, prior to which the gap did not exist. The story of the
Sundering also exists on the other side of the gap, although the versions current in the rest of the galaxy
differ considerably in their details. Whatever the actual cause and origin of the interstellar gap, it looms
much larger in Mageworlds thinking than it does in the greater galactic culture. Some scholars conclude
therefore that Eraasi and the other Mageworlds suffered more than the rest of the galaxy from the effects
of the Sundering, and thus retained more memories, however distant, of the actual event. Others take the
opposite position, and assert that the Sundering's effect on the rest of the galaxy was so much greater that
on those worlds proportionately more memory of the event was lost.

IV. Other Cultural Changes

The astute reader will notice a number of differences, both small and large, between the Eraasian
worlds as they appear at this earlier point in their history and as they became by the time of the First and
Second Magewars. The Eraasian language provides an instructive example. Five hundred years, give or
take (and depending upon which planet's revolution is used to define the term), separate the events
chronicled in this book from those of the later Magewars; Eraasian speech did not go unchanged in the
interim. The reader should note especially the tendency toward greater diphthongization over time, as
exemplified in Rayamet vice the later Raamet. Also contrast the family name sus-Khalgath with its later
spelling (as derived from Ignac' LeSoit's pronunciation) sus-Khalgaeth.
Noticeable changes also occurred in Circle garb and procedure during the five-hundred-year
gap. Readers will notice the absence, in earlier times, of the geaerith, or full-face mask. The
Mage-Circles of Llannat Hyfid's and Mael Taleion's day justify the use of the mask as allowing a clearer
perception of the eiran. More recently gathered historical evidence suggests-in view of the fact that the
geaerith also provides its wearer with anonymity-that the change had its roots in political developments
in the Eraasian hegemony.
Also worth noting are the differing conceptions of the relationship between hyperspace and the
Void. In the rest of the civilized galaxy, technology and cosmology draw a careful distinction between
hyperspace (as traveled through by starships) and the Void (as visited but mostly steered clear of by
Adepts). Eraasians, however, view the two places/phenomena as essentially the same.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Marina and Sherwood and Thyme, for beta-reading the
manuscript; Norman and Marian, for letting us hold down a table at the Red Lantern Cafe while we
drank coffee and worked on revisions; and Gregory Feeley, for coming up with a title when our minds
remained obstinately blank.

Prologue


This is the story's true beginning. On other worlds and in other places they tell it
differently, but nowhere has it been altogether forgotten.
In the years when the worlds first bore life, the galaxy was all one. The eiran-the silver
cords of life and luck-wound unbroken throughout all the aspects of human existence. They bound
life to life, and world to world, and past to future, and the pattern was all of one weaving.