"Henry Kuttner - Mutant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

I listened, with the part of the mind that listens for the soundless voices of other minds. I
heard the hollow wind. I saw snow lifting in feathery, pouring ruffles. I saw the blue shadows
deepening. I looked up, and the eastern peak was scarlet. It was sunset, and I was alone.
I reached out, listening, while the sky darkened. A star wavered, glimmered, and stood steadily
overhead. Other stars came, while the air grew colder, until the sky blazed with their westward
march.
Now it was dark. In the darkness, there were the stars, and there was I. I lay back, not even
listening. My people were gone.
I watched the emptiness beyond the stars.
7
Nothing around me or above me was alive. Why should I be alive, after all? It would be easy, very
easy, to sink down into that quiet where there was no loneliness, because there was no life. I
reached out around me, and my mind found no other thinking mind. I reached back into my memory,


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and that was a little better.
A telepath's memories go back a long way. A good long way, far earlier than his birth.
I can see clearly nearly two hundred years into the past, before the sharp, clear telepathically-
transmitted memories begin to fray and fade into secondary memories, drawn from books. Books go
back to Egypt and Babylon. But they are not the primary memories, complete with sensory overtones,
which an old man gives telepathically to a young one, and which are passed on in turn through the
generations. Our biographies are not written in books. They are written in our minds and memories,
especially the Key Lives which are handed down as fresh as they were once lived by our greatest
leaders....
But they are dead, and I am alone.
No. Not quite alone. The memories remain, Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Line Cody and Jeff Cody-
a long time dead, but still vibrantly alive in my memory. I can summon up every thought, every
emotion, the musty smell of grass- where?-the yielding of a rubbery walk beneath hurrying feet-
whose?
It would be so easy to relax and die.
No. Wait. Watch. They're alive, Burkhalter and Barton, the Key Lives are still real, though the
men who once lived them have died. They are your people. You're not alone.
Burkhalter and Barton, McNey and Line and Jeff aren't dead. Remember them. You lived their lives
telepathically as you learned them, the way they once lived them, and you can live them again. You
are not alone.
So watch. Start the film unreeling. Then you won't be alone at all, you'll be Ed Burkhalter, two
hundred years ago, feeling the cool wind blow against your face from the Sierra peaks, smelling
the timothy grass, reaching out mentally to glance into the mind of your son... the piper's
son....
It began.
I was Ed Burkhalter.
It was two hundred years ago-
THE PIPER'S SON
THE Green Man was climbing the glass mountains, and hairy, gnomish faces peered at him from
crevices. This was only another step in the Green Man's endless, exciting odyssey. He'd had a
great many adventures already-in the Flame Country, among the Dimension Changers, with the City
Apes 'who sneered endlessly while their blunt, clumsy fingers fumbled at deathrays. The trolls,