"Dan Simmons - Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

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ENDYMION

Copyright (c) 1995 by Dan Simmons.


We must not forget that the human soul,
however independently created
our philosophy represents it as being,
is inseparable
in its birth and in its growth
from the universe into which it is born.
-teilhard de chardin
Give us gods. Oh give them us!
Give us gods.
We are so tired of men
and motor-power.
-D. H. lawrence

1
You are reading this for the wrong reason.
If you are reading this to learn what it was like to make love to a messiah-our messiah-then you
should not read on, because you are little more than a voyeur.
If you are reading this because you are a fan of the old poet's Cantos and are obsessed with
curiosity about what happened next in the lives of the Hyperion pilgrims, you will be
disappointed. I do not know what happened to most of them. They lived and died almost three
centuries before I was born.
If you are reading this because you seek more insight into the message from the One Who Teaches,
you may also be disappointed. I confess that I was more interested in her as a woman than as a
teacher or messiah.
Finally, if you are reading this to discover her fate or even my fate, you are reading the wrong
document. Although both our fates seem as certain as anyone's could be, I was not with her when
hers was played out, and my own awaits the final act even as I write these words.
If you are reading this at all, I would be amazed. But this would not be the first time that
events have amazed me. The past few years have been one improbability after another, each more
marvelous and seemingly inevitable than the last. To share these memories is the reason that I am
writing. Perhaps the motivation is not even to share-knowing that the document I am creating
almost certainly will never be found-but just to put down the series of events so that I can
structure them in my own mind.
"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" wrote some pre-Hegira writer. Precisely. I
must see these things in order to know what to think of them. I must see the events turned to ink
and the emotions in print to believe that they actually occurred and touched me.
If you are reading this for the same reason that I am writing it-to bring some pattern out of the
chaos of the last years, to impose some order on the essentially random series of events that have
ruled our lives for the past standard decades-then you may be reading this for the right reason,
after all.
-=O=-***-=O=-
Where to start? With a death sentence, perhaps. But whose-my death sentence or hers? And if mine,