"Richard A. Lupoff - After the Dreamtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

After the Dreamtime
Richard A. Lupoff


Richard A. Lupoff, after a dozen years in the East as a minion of IBM,
lives now in Berkeley, California, in a pleasant house full of children,
dogs, cats, old books and magazines, and phonograph records, and
makes his way happily as a freelance writer. He is an authority on,
among other things, early comics, paleolithic science-fiction novels, rock
music, and the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs. His published work
includes, apart from nonfiction items on several of the aforementioned
subjects, three novels so far— One Million Centuries (1967), Sacred
Locomotive Flies (1971), and Thintwhistle on the Moon (1974)— and the
extraordinary, much-acclaimed novella "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys
on Little Old New Alabama," in Again, Dangerous Visions. He makes his
New Dimensions debut with a rich, powerful tale of aboriginal
astronauts and tall-masted starships that is likely to remain a long while
in readers' memories.


No, I do not see that membrane ships very closely resemble the clippers
that long ago plied the living oceans of earth, those mighty windjammers
that stood so tall above the ever-moving brine, their shafty masts
thrusting canvas squares high into earth's salt-tanged air. Possibly our
captain, Nurundere, would have something to say on the topic; he is
learned in history, law and custom. Or better yet—but no, I forget myself,
old Wuluwaid will tell you nothing.

Wuluwaid is gone; our modern outlook would mark him simply dead.
The older religions would mumble of heaven, or reincarnation. Nurundere,
our captain… now, he might have something other to say of the fate of
Wuluwaid. In the tradition of our people, he might well say that Wuluwaid
had returned to the Dreamtime.

I respect the ancient traditions. I would rather believe in the
Dreamtime than in any heaven or the workings of the great wheel of
karma, but what I believe in actually is very little.
 "Jiritzu," old Wuluwaid used to say to me, "you lack all regard for your
ancestry and for the traditions of our people. What will become of you and
your Kunapi half Dua? For what did my Bunbulama and I raise our
beautiful Miralaidj—to marry a lazy modern who cares nothing for the
Aranda, who thinks that maraiin are mere decorations, who can hardly
read a tjurunga?

"She might as well marry a piece of meat!" And saying this old
Wuluwaid would grimace, reminded by his own speech of the grayness of
his skin, and I would embrace him. He would take my face between his
two hands, rubbing my cheeks as if some of the blackness would be
absorbed into his own melanin-poor cells, then sigh and mutter, "Soon I
will be with my Bunbulama, and you will sail the membrane ships with my