"Olaf Stapledon - Last Men in London" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

WHEN I am in your world and your epoch I remember often a certain lonely place in my own world, and in the time that I call
present. It is a comer where the land juts out into the sea as a confusion of split rocks, like a herd of monsters crowding into the
water. Subterranean forces acting at this point once buckled the planet's crust into a mountain; but it was immediately tom and
shattered by gravity, that implacable djin of all great worlds. Nothing is now left of it but these rocks. On Neptune we have no
mountains, and the oceans are waveless. The stout sphere holds its watery cloak so tightly to it that even the most violent
hurricanes fail to raise more than a ripple.

Scattered among these rocks lies a network of tiny fjords, whose walls and floors are embossed with variegated life. There you
may see beneath the crystal water all manner of blobs and knobs and brilliant whorls, all manner of gaudy flowers, that search




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with their petals, or rhythmically smack their lips, all manner of clotted sea-weeds, green, brown, purple or crimson, from whose
depths sometimes a claw reaches after a drowsing sprat, while here and there a worm, fringed with legs, emerges to explore the
sandy sunlit bottom.

Among these rocks and fjords I spent my last day of leisure before setting out on one of those lengthy explorations of the past
which have made me almost as familiar with your world as with my own. It is my task to tell you of your own race as it appears
through the eyes of the far future; but first I must help you to reconstruct in imagination something of the future itself, and of the
world from which we regard you. This I can best achieve by describing, first that day of delight, spent where the broken mountain
sprawls into the sea, and then a more august event, namely the brief awakening of the Racial Mind, which was appointed for the
exaltation of the explorers upon the eve of their departure into the obscure recesses of past aeons. Finally I shall tell you
something of my own upbringing and career.

Almost the first moments of that day of recreation afforded me one of those pictures which haunt the memory ever after. The sun
had risen over a burning ocean. He was not, as you might expect in our remote world, a small and feeble sun; for between your
age and ours a collision had increased his bulk and splendour to a magnitude somewhat greater than that with which you are
familiar.

Overhead the sky was blue. But for Neptunian eyes its deep azure was infused with another unique primary colour, which your
vision could not have detected. Toward the sunrise, this tincture of the zenith gave place to green, gold, fire-red, purple, and yet
another of the hues which elude the primitive eye. Opposite there lay darkness. But low in the darkness gleamed something
which you would have taken for a very distant snowy horn, whose base was lost in night, though its crest glowed orange in the
morning. A second glance would have revealed it as too precipitous and too geometrical for any mountain. It was in fact one of
our great public buildings, many scores of miles distant, and nearly one score in height. In a world where mountains are crushed
by their own weight these towering edifices could not stand, were it not for their incredibly rigid materials, wherein artificial
atoms play the chief part. The huge crag of masonry now visible was relatively new, but it could compare in age with the younger
of your terrestrial mountains.

The shadowed sides of its buttresses and gables, and also the shadowed faces of the near rocks and of every stone, glowed with a
purple bloom, the light from a blinding violet star. This portent we call the Mad Star. It is a unique heavenly body, whose
energies are being squandered with inconceivable haste, so that it will soon be burnt out. Meanwhile it is already infecting its
neighbours with its plague. In a few thousand years our own sun will inevitably run amok in the same manner, and turn all his