"Norton, Andre - Star Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Andre Norton)

the Conqueror never ruled England.
Since this game can be envisioned on Earth, then why could it not also hold on
other planets out in the galaxy when men of our breed .go pioneering there?
Imagine a world on which a Terran ship or fleet of ships
lands. The space-weary voyagers, mutated physically by the effects of their
wandering, greet solid soil thankfully. There is a native race, primitive to
the point of barbarism. There is so much the Terrans have to give, so without
realizing their crime, they meddle. As the generations come and go they begin
to realize that each race must have its own fight for civilization, that gifts
too easily obtained are injuries, that its own destiny is the birthright of
each world.
So, regretfully, the "Gods" from the stars know that they have already
woefully harmed where they meant only good, that to save what may be salvaged
they must go. However, inhere are those of the half-blood, a mingling of
Terran and native breed, and there are those among the Terrans themselves who
do not want the stars, the endless new searching for a hospitable world on
which there is no intelligent native life.
Thus the old idea of parallel worlds awakes anew and some dream wistfully of
this same planet where some quirk of history or the past decided against the
rise of native life--the empty world they want and yet the familiar one they
love and are bound to by many ties.
Next would begin a search for a pathway across the many if worlds, a gate to
open to such exploring. And there would be many worlds--even some in which
their own landing and their labors had taken a darker and more forbidding
turn, a world on which they might even meet themselves as they would lie when
walking another lane of history and influenced by another past.
These Terrans centuries ahead of us, armed with technical knowledge we can
only imagine, might venture forth across time of an alien world, which could
lead to just such a chronicle of action beyond a Star Gate. . . .
I
INHERITANCE
THIS HAD BEEN a queer "cold" season so far. No snow, even on the upper reaches
of the peaks, no drifts to stopper the high passes, warm winds over the fields
of brittle stubble, though most of the silver-green leaves of the copses had
been brought to earth by those same winds. Instead of cold they had
experienced a general drying-out to kill the vigorous life of wood and
pasturage. And the weather was only a part of the strangeness that had settled
over Gorth--at least those parts of Gorth where men beat paths--since the Star
Lords had withdrawn.
The Star Lords, with their power, had raised the Gorthians above the beasts of
the forests and had thrown over them their protection, as the lord of any
holding could now extend the certainty of life to one outlawed and running
from sword battle. But now that the Star Lords had gone--what would follow for
Gorth?
Kincar s'Rud paused beneath the flapping mordskin banner of Styr's Holding to
direct a long, measuring glance along the hill line. His cloak, sewn cunningly
from strips of soft suard fur brought back from his solitary upland hunts, was
molded about him now by the force of that unseasonably warm wind, as he stood
exposed on the summit of the watch tower alert to any movement across the
blue-earthed fields of the Holding. Kincar was no giant to boast inches