"Olaf Stapledon - Starmaker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

I pulled myself together. I reminded myself that even if this was to be my fate, it was no great matter. The Earth
could very well do without me. And even if there was no other living world anywhere in the cosmos, still, the Earth
itself had life, and might wake to far fuller life. And even though I had lost my native planet, still, that beloved world
was real. Besides, my whole adventure was a miracle, and by continued miracle might I not stumble on some other
Earth? I remembered that I had undertaken a high pilgrimage, and that I was man's emissary to the stars.
With returning courage my power of locomotion returned. Evidently it depended on a vigorous and self-detached
men-tality. My recent mood of self-pity and earthward-yearning had hampered it.
Resolving to explore a new region of the galaxy, where perhaps there would be more of the older stars and a greater
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hope of planets, I headed in the direction of a remote and populous cluster. From the faintness of the individual
mem-bers of this vaguely speckled ball of light I guessed that it must be very far afield.
On and on I traveled in the darkness. As I never turned aside to search, my course through the ocean of space
never
 took me near enough to any star to reveal it as a disc. The lights of heaven streamed remotely past me like the
lights of distant ships. After a voyage during which I lost all measure of time I found myself in a great desert, empty
of stars, a gap between two star-streams, a cleft in the galaxy. The Milky Way surrounded me, and in all directions lay
the nor- mal dust of distant stars; but there were no considerable
lights, save the thistle-down of the remote cluster which was my goal.
This unfamiliar sky disturbed me with a sense of my in-creasing dissociation from my home. It was almost a comfort
to note, beyond the furthest stars of our galaxy, the minute smudges that were alien galaxies, incomparably more
distant than the deepest recesses of the Milky Way; and to be re-minded that, in spite of all my headlong and
miraculous traveling, I was still within my native galaxy, within the same little cell of the cosmos where she, my life's
friend, still lived. I was surprised, by the way, that so many of the alien galaxies appeared to the naked eye, and that
the largest was a pale, cloudy mark bigger than the moon in the terrestrial
sky. By contrast with the remote galaxies, on whose appearance all my voyaging failed to make impression, the
star-cluster ahead of me was now visibly expanding. Soon after I had crossed the great emptiness between the
star-streams, my cluster confronted me as a huge cloud of brilliants. Presently I was passing through a more populous
area, and then the cluster itself opened out ahead of me, covering the whole forward sky with its congested lights. As
a ship approaching port encounters other craft, so I came upon and passed star after star. When I had penetrated into
the heart of the cluster, I was in a region far more populous than any that I had explored. On every side the sky blazed
with suns, many of which appeared far brighter than Venus in the Earth's sky. I felt the exhilaration of a traveler who,
after an ocean cross-ing, enters harbors by night and finds himself surrounded by the lights of a metropolis. In this
congested region, I told myself, many close approaches must have occurred, many planetary systems must have been
formed.
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Once more I looked for middle-aged stars of the sun's type. All that I had passed hitherto were young giants, great
as the whole solar system. After further searching I found a few likely stars, but none had planets. I found also many
double and triple stars, describing their incalculable orbits; and great continents of gas, in which new stars were
condensing.
At last, at last I found a planetary system. With almost insupportable hope I circled among these worlds; but all
were greater than Jupiter, and all were molten. Again I hurried from star to star. I must have visited thousands, but all
in vain. Sick and lonely I fled out of the cluster. It dwindled behind me into a ball of down, sparkling with dew-drops. In
front of me a great tract of darkness blotted out a section of the Milky Way and the neighboring area of stars, save for
a few near lights which lay between me and the obscuring opacity. The billowy edges of this huge cloud of gas or dust
were revealed by the glancing rays of bright stars beyond it. The sight moved me with self-pity; on so many nights at
home had I seen the edges of dark clouds silvered just so by moonlight. But the cloud which now opposed me could
have swallowed not merely whole worlds, not merely count-less planetary systems, but whole constellations.
Once more my courage failed me. Miserably I tried to shut out the immensities by closing my eyes. But I had neither
eyes nor eyelids. I was a disembodied, wandering view-point. I tried to conjure up the little interior of my home, with
the curtains drawn and the fire dancing. I tried to persuade myself that all this horror of darkness and dis tance and