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

This kind of internal "telepathic" intercourse, which was to serve me in all my wanderings, was at first difficult,
ineffec-tive, and painful. But in time I came to be able to live through the experiences of my host with vividness and
ac-curacy, while yet preserving my own individuality, my own critical intelligence, my own desires and fears. Only
when the other had come to realize my presence within him could he, by a special act of volition, keep particular
thoughts secret from me.
It can well be understood that at first I found these alien minds quite unintelligible. Their very sensations differed
from my familiar sensations in important respects. Their thoughts and all their emotions and sentiments were strange
to me. The traditional groundwork of these minds, their most fa-miliar concepts, were derived from a strange history,
and ex-pressed in languages which to the terrestrial mind were subtly misleading.
I spent on the Other Earth many "other years," wandering from mind to mind and country to country, but I did not
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gain any clear understanding of the psychology of the Other Men and the significance of their history till I had
encoun-tered one of their philosophers, an aging but still vigorous man whose eccentric and unpalatable views had
prevented him from attaining eminence. Most of my hosts, when they became aware of 'my presence within them,
regarded me either as an evil spirit or as a divine messenger. The more sophisticated, however, assumed that I was a
mere disease, a symptom of insanity in themselves. They therefore promptly applied to the local "Mental Sanitation
Officer." After I had spent, according to the local calendar, a year or so of bitter loneliness among minds who refused
to treat me as a human being, I had the good fortune to come under the philosopher's notice. One of my hosts, who
complained of suffering from "voices," and visions of "another world," appealed to the old man for help. Bvalltu, for
such approximately was the phi-losopher's name, the "11" being pronounced more or less as in Welsh, Bvalltu effected
a "cure" by merely inviting me to accept the hospitality of his own mind, where, he said, he would very gladly entertain
me. It was with extravagant joy that I made contact at last with a being who recognized in me a human personality.
2. A BUSY WORLD
So many important characteristics of this world-society need to be described that I cannot spend much time on the
more obvious features of the planet and its race. Civilization had reached a stage of growth much like that which was
fa-miliar to me. I was constantly surprised by the blend of similarity and difference. Traveling over the planet I found
that cultivation had spread over most of the suitable areas, and that industrialism was already far advanced in many
countries. On the prairies huge flocks of mammal-like crea-tures grazed and scampered. Larger mammals, or
quasi-mammals, were farmed on all the best pasture land for food and leather. I say "quasi-mammal" because, though
these creatures were viviparous, they did not suckle. The chewed cud, chemically treated in the maternal belly, was
spat into the offspring's mouth as a jet of pre-digested fluid. It was thus also that human mothers fed their young.
The most important means of locomotion on the Other Earth was the steam-train, but trains in this world were so
bulky that they looked like whole terraces of houses on the
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move. This remarkable railway development was probably due to the great number and length of journeys across
des-erts. Occasionally I traveled on steam-ships on the few and small oceans, but marine transport was on the whole
back-ward. The screw propeller was unknown, its place being taken by paddle wheels. Internal-combustion engines
were used in road and desert transport. Flying, owing to the rarified at-mosphere, had not been achieved; but
rocket-propulsion was already used for long-distance transport of mails, and for long-range bombardment in war. Its
application to aero-nautics might come any day.
My first visit to the metropolis of one of the great empires of the Other Earth was an outstanding experience.
Every-thing was at once so strange and so familiar. There were streets and many-windowed stores and offices. In this
old city the streets were narrow, and so congested was the motor traffic that pedestrians were accommodated on
special ele-vated tracks slung beside the first-story windows and across the streets.
The crowds that streamed along these footpaths were as variegated as our own. The men. wore cloth tunics, and
trousers surprisingly like the trousers of Europe, save that the crease affected by the respectable was at the side of the
leg. The women, breastless and high-nostriled like the men, were to be distinguished by their more tubular lips, whose
biological function it was to project food for the infant. In place of skirts they disported green and glossy silk tights
and little gawdy knickers. To my unaccustomed vision the effect was inexpressibly vulgar. In summar both sexes often
appeared in the streets naked to the waist; but they always wore gloves.