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

strata to
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the southern ocean and lands, past the roots of gum trees and the feet of the inverted antipodeans, through their
blue, sun-pierced awning of day, and out into the eternal night, where sun and stars are together. For there, dizzyingly
far below me, like fishes in the depth of a lake, lay the nether constellations. The two domes of the sky were fused into
one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent
wire. The com-pleted hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe.
In a strange vertigo, I looked for reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still were; and
the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all. It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass,
or of some more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled
the first stroke.
Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven
no longer as a jeweled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And though for the most part
the great and familiar lights of the sky stood forth as our near neighbors, some brilliant stars were seen to be in fact
remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because they were so near. On every side the middle
distance was crowded with swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the Milky Way had
receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of
luminous mists, and deep perspectives of stellar populations.
The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was
more. Peering between the stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of light, other such
vor-tices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the void, depth be-yond depth, so far afield that even the eye of
imagination
could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a
void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.
Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it
as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet's dark side a hill, and on that hill
myself. For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of
light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered
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that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of imagination, the rays coming thus to me
"round" the cosmos would have revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth, or perhaps
even the Sun, was formed.
But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the curtained windows of our home, which,
though star-pierced, was still more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with the whole suburb,
and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me
an insub-stantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could neither see nor touch my own flesh.
And when I willed to move my limbs, nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my body,
and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given way to a vague lightness and exhilaration.
When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I had died, and was entering some wholly
un-expected new existence. Such a banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I understood
that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized, con-crete atom of community. The violence of my distress
shocked me. But soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably not dead, but in some sort of
trance, from which I might wake at any minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this mysterious
change. With scientific interest I would observe all that happened to me.
I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was shrinking and condensing. The nether
stars were no longer visible through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top, a broad disc of
dark-ness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun,
formerly visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I
must have been hundreds of miles above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric