"Bruce Holland Rogers - Alexandrian Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

unimaginably alien. Tetrapods. Close-set, forward-looking eyes. Membranes that might be ears.
Openings that might be mouths, once capable of uttering who-knows-what extraordinary thoughts and
wondrous sounds. About them lay pieces of their fantastic machinery.
Strange, Hacker thought, but these twisted bodies sticky with red blood did not repulse him. In their
strangeness, in the slight swelling of their forms, they seemed somehow angelic. And that, he thought, was
the problem. Who knows what swords angels may bear?
As he and Pereira packed the dynamite inside the ship, piled in the bodies and mysterious objects,
Hacker wondered; Who am I, doing this?
A Viking in Ireland?
An Ostrogoth chieftain?
Cortez?
He connected the caps and spooled out wire as he walked back into the jungle. He set down the
equipment and went back to push the two halves of the small ship together in order to maximize the blast
damage. He stepped back for a last look, and he knew. Goths, Vikings, Conquistadors, all had been
great vandals. But he was none of these. He knew better than any of them what he was destroying. He
was like one of Caesar's centurions, standing in the libraries of Alexandria, torch aloft-- overawed and
admiring-- before letting the torch fall.
***


Out of the explosion grew another sound: the beating of metal wings. A helicopter gunship roared over
their heads. Then another, and another.
Hacker stuffed the length of cloth, shimmering now red, now gold, now blue and green, into his
knapsack. And the rain came falling in the huge drops Pereira called gotarãos, following them into the
jungle, flooding their footprints away.
Published by Alexandria Digital Literature. ( http://www.alexlit.com/ )

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