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

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Last Men in London




which the sunlight revelled. But the eyes were bright jewels capable of many phases from sapphire to emerald.

Like others of our kind, this girl bore two additional bright eyes in the back of her head. They sparkled quaintly in the archaic
glory of her hair. Like the rest of us, she had on her crown yet another and more important organ of vision which we call the
astronomical eye. Normally sunken level with her hair, it could at will be projected upwards like a squat telescope. The exquisite
development of this organ in her had determined her career. All of us are in a manner astronomers; but she is an astronomer by
profession.

Her whole face, though so brilliantly alive, was unlike any human type known to readers of this book, since it was so much more
animal. Her nose was broad and feline, but delicately moulded. Her full lips were subtle at the corners. Her ears moved among
her locks like the ears of a lion.

Grotesque, you say, inhuman! No! Beside this the opaque and sluggish faces of your proudest beauties are little better than lumps
of clay, or the masks of insects.

But indeed it is impossible for you to see her as I saw her then. For in that look there seemed to find expression the whole
achievement of our race, and the full knowledge of its impending tragedy. At the same time there was in it a half-mischievous
piety toward the little simple creatures that she had been watching, and equally, it seemed, toward the stars and man himself.

Smiling, she now spoke to me; if I may call 'speech' the telepathic influence which invaded my brain from hers.

That you may understand the significance of her words, I must explain that in our Neptunian rock-pools there are living things of
three very different stocks. The first is rare. One may encounter in some sheltered cranny a vague greenish slime. This is the only
relic of primeval Neptunian life, long since outclassed by invaders. The second stock is by far the commonest throughout our
world. Nearly all our living types are triumphant descendants of the few animals and plants which men brought, deliberately or
by accident, to Neptune from Venus, nearly a thousand million years before my day, and almost as long after the age that you call
present. Third, there are also, even in these little fjords, a few descendants of those ancient men themselves. These very remote
cousins of my own human species are, of course, fantastically degenerate. Most have long ago ceased to be recognizably human;
but in one, whose name in our language you might translate 'Homunculus', nature has achieved a minute and exquisite caricature
of humanity. Two splay feet glue him to the rock. From these rises an erect and bulbous belly, wearing on its summit an upturned
face. The unpleasantly human mouth keeps opening and shutting. The eyes are mere wrinkles, the nose a wide double trumpet.
The ears, deaf but mobile, have become two broad waving fans, that direct a current of water toward the mouth. Beneath each ear
is a little wart-like excrescence, all that is left of the human arm and hand.




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Last Men in London




One of these degenerate human beings, one of these fallen descendants of your own kind, had attracted my companion's attention.