"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 3 - The Dark Design" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

however, was dark brown. One eye was green, though a rare leaf-green.
The other eye had startled Burton when Thanabur had first turned his face
toward
him. Instead of the green mate he had expected, he saw a jewel. It looked like
an enormous blue diamond, a flashing, multifaceted precious stone set in his
eye
socket.
He felt uneasy whenever that jewel was turned on him. What was its purpose?
What
did it see in him that a living eye could not see?
Of the twelve, only three had spoken: Loga, Thanabur, and a slim but
full-breasted blonde with large blue eyes. From the manner in which she and
Loga
spoke to each other, Burton thought that they could be husband and wife.
Watching them offstage, Burton noted again that just above the heads of each,
his other self included, was a globe. They whirled, were of many changing
colors, and extended six-sided arms, green, blue, black, and white. Then the
arms would shrink into the globe, only to be replaced by others.
Burton tried to correlate the rotating spheres and the mutation in the arms
with
the personalities of the three and of himself, with their physical
appearances,
with the tones of their voices, with the meanings of their words, with their
emotional attitudes. He failed to find any significant linkages.
When the first, the real, scene had taken place, he had not seen his own aura.
The spoken lines were not quite the same as during the actual event. It was as
if the Dream-Maker had rewritten the scene.
Loga, the red-haired man, said, "We had a number of agents looking for you.
They
were a pitifully small number, considering the thirty-six billion, six
million,
nine thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven candidates that are living along
The
River."
"Candidates for what?" the Burton on the stage said.
In the first performance, he had not uttered that line.
"That's for us to know and you to find out," Loga said.
Loga flashed teeth that seemed inhumanly white. He said, "We had no idea that
you were escaping us by suicide. The years went by. There were other things
for
us to do, so we pulled all agents from the Burton Case, as we called it,
except
for some stationed at both ends of The River. Somehow, you had knowledge of
the
polar tower. We found out how later."
Burton, the watcher, thought, But you didn't find out from X.
He tried to get nearer to the actors so he could look at them more closely.
Which one was the Ethical who had awakened him in the preressurection place?
Which one had visited him during a stormy, lightning-racked night? Who was it
that had told him that he must help him? Who was the renegade whom Burton knew