"Moore, C L - Lost Paradise UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

But there was little time for wonder and speculation now. He was watching the loveliness of Baloise floating neaEer and nearer through the dusk that seemed aswim with a radiance so soffly real that it was like walking through darkly shining water. He was testing just how much latitude this new experience allowed him. He could see what his host saw, and he began to realize now that the man’s other senses were open to his perception too. He could even share in his emotions, for he had known a moment of passionate longing for the whole white city of Baloise as he looked down from the-hill, longing and love such as an exile might feel for his native city.
Gradually, too, he became aware that the man was afraid. A queer, dark, miasmic terror lwked just below the surface of his conscious thoughts, something whose origin he could not fathom. It gave the loveliness he looked on a poignancy almost as sharp as pain, etching every white spire and gleaming dome of Baloise deep into his remembering mind.
Slowly, movng in the shadow of his own dark terror, the man went down the hill. The ivory wall that circled Baloise rose over bun, a low wall with a crest fretted into a band of
lacy carving upon whose convolutions the lucent Earthlight lay like silver. Under a pomted arch he walked, still moving with that slow resolute step as if he approached something dreadful from which there was no escape. And strongly and more strongly Smith was aware of the fear that drowned the man’s unforinulated thoughts,-washing in a dark tide beneath the coilsciousness of everything he did. And stronger still the poignant love for Baloise ached in him andbis eyes lingered like slow caresses on the pale roofs and Earth-washed walls and the pearly dimness that lay shadowily between, where the light of rising Earth was only a reflection. He was memorizing the loveliness of Baloise, as an exile might do. He was lingering upon the sight of it with a yearning so deep that it seemed as if even unto death he must carry behind his eyes the Earth-lit loveliness on which he gazed.
Pale walls and translucent domes and arches rose about him as he walked slowly along a street paved in white seasand, so that his feet fell soundlessly upon its surface and he might have been walking in a translucent dream. Now Earth had swum higher above the reflecting roofs, and the great shining globe of it floated free overhead, veiled and opalescent with the rainbow seas of its atmosphere. Smith, looking up through the eyes of this unknown stranger, could scarcely recognize the configuration of the great green continents spread out beneath their veils of quivering air, and the shapes of the shining ~уas were strange to him. He looked into a past so remote that little upon his native planet was familiar to him.
Now his strange host was turning aside from thC broad, sandy street. He went down a little paved alley, dim in the swimming light of Earth, and pushed open the gate of grillewor~k that closed its end. Under the opened arch he walked into a garden, beyond whose Earth-bright loveliness a low white house rose pale as ivory against dark trees.
There was a pool in the garden’s center, Earth swain like a great glimmering opal in its darkness, brimming the water with a greater glory than ever shone into earthly pool. And
bending over that basin of spilled Earthlight was a woman.
The silvery cascade of her hair swung forward about a face paler than the pallor of rising Earth, and lovely with a deli-.
cacy more exquisite than ever shaped an Earthwoman’s features into beauty. Her moon-born slimness as she bent above the pool was the slimness of some airy immortal; for no Earthly woman ever walked whose delicacy was half so
sweet and fragile.
She lifted her head as the grille-gate opened, and swayed to her feet in a motion so unearthly light that she scarcely seemed to touch the grass as she moved forward, a creature of pale enchantment in an enchanted Moon-garden. The man crossed the grass to her reluctantly, ‘and Smith was aware in him of a dread and a soul-deep aching that choked up in his throat until he could scarcely speak. The woman lifted her face, clear now in the Eaithlight and so delicately ~nodeled that it was more like some exquisite jewel-carving than a face of bone and Moon-white flesh. Her eyes were great and dark with an unnamed dread. She breathed in the lightest echo of a
voice. - -
“It has come?”. . . and the tongue she spoke rippled like running water, in strange, light, breathing cadences that Smith understood only through the mind of the man whose
memory he shared. -
His host said in a voice that was a little too loud in its
resolution not to quiver. - - -
“Yes—it has come.”
At that the woman’s eyes closed involuntarily, her whole exquisite face crumpling into sudden, stricken grief so heavy that it seemed those fragile creatures must be crushed under the weight of it, the whole delicate body-sink overburdeiled to the grass. But she did not fall. She stood swaying for an instant, and then the man’s arms were about her, holding her close in a desperate embrace. And through the memory of the long-dead man who held her, Smith could feel the delicacy of the eons-dead woman, the warm softness of her flesh, the tiny bones, like a bird’s. Again he felt futilely that she was
too fragile a creature to know such sorrow as racked her now, and a helpless anger rose in him against whatever unnamed thing it was that kindled such terror and heartbreak in them
both. - -
For a long moment the man held her close, feeling the soft fragility of her body warm agalast him, the rack of silent sobs that must surely tear her very bones apart, so delicate were they, so desperate her soundless agony. Andin his own throat the tightness of sorrow was choking, and his own eyes burned with unshed tears. The dark miasma of terror had strengthened until the Earth-lit garden was blotted out behind it, and nothing remained but the black weight of his fear, the pain of his hopeless grief.
At last he loosed the girl in his arms a little and murmured against her silvery hair, “Hush, hush, my darling. Do not sorrow so—we knew’ that this must come some day. It comes to everyone alive—it has come to us too. Do not weep so.. .
She sobbed once more, a deep ache of pure pain, and then stood back in his arms and nodded, shaking back the silver hair. -
“I know,” she said. “I know.” She lifted her head and looked up toward EarthJs great haloed mystery swimming through veils of colored enchantment above them. The light of it glistened in the tears on her face. “Almost,” she said, I ‘wish we two had goni_there.”
- He shook her a little in his arms.
“No—life in the colonies, with only Seles’ little glimmer of green light shining down on us to tear our hearts with memories of home—no, my dear. That would have been a lifetime of longing and yearning to return. We have lived in happiness here, knowing only this moment of pain at the end. It is better.”
‘She bent her head and laid her forehead against his shoulder, shutting out the sight of risen Earth.
“Is it?” she asked him thickly, her voice indistinct with tears. “ls a’lifetime of nostalgia and grieving, with you, not
better than paradise without you? Wall, the choice is made now. I am happy only in this—that yOu have been summoned
first and need not know this—this dreadfulness—of facing life alone. You must go now—quickly, or I shall never let you. Yes—we knew it must end—that the summons must come. Good-bye—my very dear.”
She lifted her wet face and closed her eyes.
Smith would have looked away then if it had been possible for him. But he could not detach himself even in emotion from the host whose memory he shared, and the unbearable instant stabbed as deeply at his own heart as it did at the man whose memory he shared. He took her gently again into his arms and kissed the quivering mouth, salt with the taste of her tears. An4 then without a backward glance he turned toward the open gate and walked slowly out under its arch, moving as a man moves to his doom.
He went down the naiww way into the open street again, under the glory of risen Earth. The beauty of the eons-dead
Baloise he walked through ached like a dull pain in his heart beneath the sharper anguish of that farewell. The salt of the girl’s tears was still on his lips, and it seemed to him that not even the death he went to could give him ease from the pain of the moments he had just passed through. He went on reso
lutely. - ‘ -
Smith realized that they were turning now toward the center of Baloise the Beautiful. Great open squares here and there broke the ivory ranks of the buildings, and there were men and women moving infrequently through the streets, fragile as birds in their Moon-born delicacy, silvery pale under the immense -pale disk of high-swinging Earth that. dominated that scene until nothing seemed real but its vast marvel hanging overhead. The buildings were larger here, and though they lost none of their enchanted beauty they were more clearly places of industry than had been those domed and grille-fretted dwellings on the outskirts of the city.
Once they skirted a great square inwhose center bulked a vast sphere of silvery sheen that reflected the brightness of
the sky-filled Earth. It was a ship—a space-ship. Smith’s
eyes would have told him that even if the knowledge that
floated through his mind from the mind of the Moon-dweller had not made it clear. It was a space-ship loaded with men and machinery and supplies for the colonies struggling against the invening jungles upon steamy, prehistoric Earth.
They watched the last passengers fijing up the ramps that led to orifices in its lower curve, Moon-white people moving silently as people in a dream under the vast pale glowing of the Moon-high Earth. It was queer how silent they were. The whole great square and the immense sphere that filled it arid the throngs moving up and down the ramps might have been figures in a dream. It was hard to realize that they were not—that they had existed, flesh and blood, stone and steel, under the light of a vast, heaven-filling globe haloed in its rainbowy haze of atmosphere, once, milleniums ago.
As they neared the farther side of the square, Smith saw through his host’s scarcely observing eyes the ramps lower and the orifices close in the huge bubble-ship. The Moonman was too wrapped in his agony and heartbreak and despair to pay much heed to what was taking place there in the square, so that Smith caught only abstract glimpses of the great ship floating bubble-light up from the pavement, silently, effortlessly, with no such bursts of thunderous noise and great washes of flame as attend the launching of modern spaceships. Curiosity rode him hard, but he could do nothing. His only glimpses of this ages-past scene must be taken through’ ‘the eyes of his host’s ‘memory. They went on out of the,~ square.
A great dark building loomed up above the pale-roofed houses. It was the only dark thing he had seen in Baloise, and the sight of it woke into sudden life the terror that had been dwelling formlessly and deep in the mind of his host. But be 1 went on unhesitatingly. The broad street led straight up to thearchway that opened in the dark wall’s faзade, a portal as~ cavernous and blackly threatening as the portals of death~ itself.
Under the shadow of it the man paused. He looked back lingeringly upon the pearly pallor of Baloise. Over the domed and pinnacled roofs the great pale light of Earth brooded. Earth itself, swimming in seas of opalescent atmosphere, all
its continents silver-green, all its seas colored like veiled’
jewels, glowed down upon him for the last time. The full tide of his love for Baloise, of his love for the lost girl in the garden, of his love for the whole green, sweet satellite he
lived on came choking up in his throat, and his heart was near bursting with the sweet fullness of the life he must leave~
Then he turned resolutely and went in under the dark
archway. Through his set eyes Smith could ‘see nothing within but a gloom like moonlight shining through mist, so that the space inside was full of a grayness faintly translucent, faintly luminous. And the terror that clogged the man ‘s mind was laying hold on his own as they went steadily forward, in