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

planets to white-hot gas. But at present, I mean in the age which I call present, the Mad Star is only a brilliant feature of our night
sky.




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Last%20Men%20in%20London,%20by%20W%20Olaf%20Stapledon.html (6 of 179)5-9-2007 13:23:14
Last Men in London




On the morning of which I am speaking there lay full length on the brink of a little cliff, and gazing into the pool beneath her, a
woman of my world. To me she is lovely, exquisite, the very embodiment of beauty; to you she would seem a strange half-human
monster. To me, as she lay there with her breasts against the rock and one arm reaching down into the water, her whole form
expressed the lightness and suppleness of a panther. To you she would have seemed unwieldy, elephantine, and grotesque in
every feature. Yet if you were to see her moving in her own world, you would know, I think, why her name in our speech is the
equivalent of Panther in yours.

If you or any of your kind were to visit our world, and if by miracle you were to survive for a few moments in our alien
atmosphere, gravity would make it almost impossible for you to support yourselves at all. But we, since our bones, like our
buildings, are formed largely of artificial atoms, and are far more rigid than steel, since moreover our muscle cells have been
most cunningly designed, can run and jump with ease. It is true, however, that in spite of our splendid tissues we have to be more
solidly built than the Terrestrials, whose limbs remind us unpleasantly of insects.

The woman on the rock would certainly have surprised you, for she is a member of one of our most recent generations, whose
skin and flesh are darkly translucent. Seeing her there, with the sunlight drenching her limbs, you might have taken her for a
statue, cut from some wine-dark alabaster, or from carbuncle; save that, with every movement of her arm, sunken gleams of
crimson, topaz, and gold-brown rippled the inner night of her shoulder and flank. Her whole substance, within its lovely curves
and planes, looked scarcely solid, but rather a volume of obscure flame and smoke poised on the rock. On her head a mass of
hair, flame-like, smoke-like, was a reversion to the primitive in respect of which she could never decide whether it was a thing for
shame or complacency. It was this pre-historic decoration which first drew me toward her. In a closer view you would have
noticed that on her back and the outer sides of her limbs the skin's translucency was complicated by a very faint leopard-like
mottling. I also bear that mottling; but I am of the sort whose flesh is opaque, and my bronze-green skin is of a texture somewhat
harsher than I should choose. In her, how well I know it, the skin is soft and rich to the exploring hand.

While I watched her, she raised her face from studying the water-dwellers, and looked at me, laughing. It was that look which
gave me the brief but strangely significant experience the memory of which was to refresh me so often in your uncouth world. It
was not only that her face was lit up with merriment and tenderness; but in that fleeting expression the very spirit of humanity
seemed to regard me. I cannot make you realize the potency of that glance, for the faces of your own kind afford almost no hint
of such illumination. I can only assert that in our species, facial expression is more developed than in yours. The facial muscles
respond to every changing flicker of experience and emotion, as pools respond to every breath of wind with a thousand criss-
cross rippling tremors.

The face that now looked at me was unlike terrestrial countenances both in its subtly alien contours and in its dark translucency,
which half-revealed the underlying paleness of bone. It was like a stirred and dancing pool of dark but warm-tinted wine, in