"Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

He was dead, and joy was gone.

She woke to that fatal fact when the madness had ebbed. It chilled the fire in her bowels. Until that
dreadful instant, her whole world had loved her. Secure in her royal mother’s devotion and the hive’s
safe warmth, a happy sharer at the family feasts of rich life-metals the workers brought from the

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Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst (v1.1)


starward planets, she had known neither care nor fear.

Lying alone and forlorn, there in that deep pit where the blaze of their union had thawed the snow,
feeling dead as the bright shards of his armor still clutched in her claws, she longed for all she had
lost. In sad recollection, she was hatched again into the hive’s happy music. She rode once more into
space on a grumbling worker’s back and learned to fly again, riding her blazing jets.

In wistful retrospection, she danced around their playground moons again in the splendid
constellations of her gifted sisters, renewing the racial rituals of life and love and death. In joyous
unison, they memorized the classic sagas of their warrior kind. She lost herself again in the sacred
games of fight-and-kill in the tunnels of their hive. Wickedly she flirted again with the bright-shining
rivals of her prince, teasingly testing his devotion.

All that, forever ended.

Her sisters would scorn her now, and her former suitors would shun her for killing their noble
companion. The food worlds would be forbidden, and the hive would be shut against her, a dreadful
trap where even the last sad relic of her once-loving mother would be lurking to assail her.

In that bitter aftermath, too sick even to suck at the last of her lover’s freezing juices, she lay there
amid the glittering bits of his empty armor till the furious princes swarmed down to drive her into the
interstellar night, away from all she had ever loved.

Flying out into the dead emptiness of space, she clung to all those sad recollections until a new and
dreadful hunger overwhelmed them with a terrible imperative, driving her on through the heatless
dark to seek a place for her own new hive, a world where her firstborn neuter foragers might find life-
metals and flight food for new generations as splendidly daring as their noble father had been.

As ruthless as her own fatal lust, that new ravening chose a star where she could sense no rival hive.
Driven by it, helpless as a hatchling, she flew out across the halo where her prince had hunted and on
into the black gulf beyond.

The flight took too long. Unfed, her prince’s precious seed had to burrow too soon into her own
willing flesh. The first ecstatic agonies of that gave her a proud theme for her new saga, but they soon
became eternities of delirium.


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Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst (v1.1)