"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

little meat every day, happy sniffing the air or competing
with each other to see who could get his leg up the highest
and spray the most piss against the snowhut's yellow wall.
Dogs had no conception of shaida, and they were never troubled
by it as people were.
While the storm built ever stronger and howled like a
wolverine caught in a trap, he spent most of his time cocooned
in his sleeping furs, thinking. In his mind, he searched for
the source of shaida. Most of the Alaloi tribes believed that
only a human being could be touched with shaida, or rather,
that only a human being could bring shaida into the world. And
shaida, itself, could infect only the outer part of a man, his
face, which is the Alaloi term for persona, character, cultural
imprinting, emotions, and the thinking mind. The deep self, his
purusha, was as pure and clear as glacier ice; it could be
neither altered nor sullied nor harmed in any way. He thought
about his tribe's most sacred teachings, and he asked himself a
penetrating, heretical question: what if Haidar and the other
dead fathers of his tribe had been wrong? Perhaps people were
really like fragments of clear ice with cracks running through
the centre. Perhaps shaida touched the deepest parts of each
man and child. And since people (and his word for 'people' was
simply 'Devaki') were of the world, he would have to journey
into the very heart of the world to find shaida's true source.
Shaida is the cry of the world when it has lost its soul he
thought. Only, how could the world ever lose its soul? What if
the World-soul were not lost, but rather, inherently flawed
with shaida?
For most of a day and a night, like a thallow circling in
search of prey, he skirted the track of this terrifying
thought. If, as he had been taught, the world were continually
being created, every moment being pushed screaming from the
bloody womb of Time, that meant that shaida
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was being created, too. Every moment, then, impregnated with
flaws that might eventually grow and fracture outward and
shatter the world and all its creatures. If this were so, then
there could be no evolution toward harmony, no balance of life
and death, no help for pain. All that is not halla is shaida,
he remembered. But if everything were shaida, then true halla
could never be.
Even though Danlo was young, he sensed that such logical
thinking was itself flawed in some basic way, for it led to
despair of life, and try as he could, he couldn't help feeling
the life inside where it surged, all hot and eager and good.
Perhaps his assumptions were wrong; perhaps he did not
understand the true nature of shaida and halla; perhaps logic
was not as keen a tool as Soli had taught him it could be. If
only Soli hadn't died so suddenly, he might have heard the
whole Song of Life and learned a way of affirmation beyond