"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 1 - To your Scattered Bodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

went on down to infinity. He tried to grasp it because it was the nearest solid object, but
something invisible was resisting him. It was as if lines of some force were pushing against him,
repelling him.

Slowly, he turned over in a somersault. Then the resistance halted him with his fingertips about
six inches from the rod. He straightened his body out and moved forward a fraction of an inch. At
the same time, his body began to rotate on its longitudinal axis. He sucked in sir with aloud
sawing noise. Though he knew no hold existed for him, he could not help flailing his arms in panic
to try to seize onto something.

He was face 'down', (or was it up?) Whatever the direction, it was opposite to that toward which
he had been looking when he had awakened. Not that this mattered. `Above' him and `below' him the
view was the same. He was suspended in space, kept from falling by an invisible and unfelt cocoon.
Six feet `below' him was the body of a woman with a very pale skin. She was naked and completely


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hairless. She seemed to be asleep: Her eyes were closed, and her breasts rose and fell gently. Her
legs were together and straight out and her arms were by her side. She turned slowly like a
chicken on a spit.

The same force that was rotating her was also rotating him. He spun slowly away from her, saw
other naked and hairless bodies, men, women, and children, opposite him in silent spinning rows.
Above him was the rotating naked and hairless body of a Negro.

He lowered his head so that he could see along his own body. He was naked and hairless, too. His
skin was smooth, and the muscles of his belly were ridged, and his thighs were packed with strong
young muscles. The veins that had stood out like blue mole-ridges were gone. He no longer had the
body of the enfeebled and sick sixty-nine-year-old man who had been dying ply a moment ago. And
the hundred or so scars were gone.

He realized then that there were no old men or women among the bodies surrounding him. All seemed
to be about twenty-five years old, though it was difficult to determine the exact age, since the
hairless heads and pubes made them seem older and younger at the same time.

He had boasted that he knew no fear. Now fear ripped away the cry forming in this throat. His fear
pressed down on him and squeezed the new life from him He had been stunned at first because he was
still living. Then his position in space and the arrangement of his new environment had frozen his
senses. He was seeing and feeling through a thick semi-opaque window. After a few seconds
something snapped inside him. He could almost hear it, as if a window had suddenly been raised.

The world took a shape which he could grasp, though he could not comprehend it. Above him, on both
sides, below him, as far as he could see, bodies floated. They were arranged in vertical and
horizontal rows. The up-and-down ranks were separated by red rods, slender as broomsticks, one of
which was twelve inches from the feet of the sleepers and the other twelve inches from their
heads. Each body was spaced about six feet from the body above and below and on each side.

The rods came up from an abyss without bottom and soared into an abyss without ceiling. That