Robert Arthur - Evolution's End

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 70.5KB 9 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Evolution’s End

Robert Arthur

(1909-1969)

Aydem was pushing the humming vacuum duster along the endless stone corridors of the great

underground Repository of Natural Knowledge when Ayveh, coming up quietly behind him, put her

hands over his eyes.

He whirled, to see Ayveh’s laughing face, mischief dancing on it.

“Ayveh!” he exclaimed eagerly. “But what are you doing here? It is forbidden any woman—“

“I know.” Ayveh threw back her head, her long hair, richly golden, rippling down her shoulders to

contrast with the pale apple-green of the shapeless linen robe she wore—a robe identical to Aydem’s,

the universal garb of the human slaves of the more-than-human Masters who ruled the world. It was an

underground world. Generations since, the Masters, their great, thin-skulled heads and mighty brains

proving uncomfortably vulnerable to the ordinary rays of the sun, had retreated underground.

“But Dmu Dran wishes to see you, Aydem,” the girl Ayveh went on, “and he sent me to fetch you. There

are visitors arriving, and you must convey them from the tube station to his demonstration chambers.

They are very important visitors.”

“But why did he not transmit the order to me by directed thinking?” Aydem asked, puzzled. “He knows

that even out here, in the Exhibit Section, I would receive it.”

“Perhaps he sent me because he knew I wished to see you.” Ayveh suggested happily. “And because he

knew you hungered for the sight of me. There are times, Aydem, when Dmu Dran actually seems to

understand what feelings are.”

“A Master understand feelings?” Aydem’s tone was scornful. “The Masters are nothing but brains. Great

machines for thought, which know nothing of joy or sorrow or hunger for another.”

“Shh!” Frightened, Ayveh put her fingers to his lips. “You must not say such things. Generous as Dmu

Dran is, he is still a Master, and if his mind should chance to be listening, he would have to punish you. It

might even mean the fuel chambers.”

Aydem kissed the fingers that had stopped his speech. Then, seeing the mingled fear and longing in her

face, he drew her close and kissed her savagely, tasting the sweetness of her lips until a pulse was beating

like a hammer in his throat.

Shaken, Ayveh freed herself and looked about, fearful that someone might have seen. There was no one.

The corridors of the exhibit chambers of this tremendous museum of natural history of which their

Master, Dmu Dran, was curator, wound endlessly away in darkness except for the tiny lighted area that

enclosed them.

“There is no one to see,” Ayden reassured her. “I alone tend the exhibit chambers, and only I am

permitted to leave the Master’s quarters without orders. And if any did see, who would tell?”

“Ekno,” the girl whispered. “He would tell. He would like to see you sent into the fuel chambers, because

he knows that we—that we—“

Her voice faltered and trailed off at the look of grimness in the man’s face. Aydem stared down at her, at

her loveliness, before he spoke. He himself stood nearly six feet tall, and his dark hair was a shaggy mane

dropping almost to his shoulders. He was beardless, for all facial hair had been removed by an unguent

when he was a youth—a whim of Dmu Dran’s, though many Masters were less fastidious.

His body held the sturdiness of the trunk of an oak—which he had never seen. And though his duties

were light in this mechanized, sub-surface world to which man’s life on Mother Earth had retreated with

the evolution of the Masters, muscles corded his body and were but lightly hidden by the green robe that

swathed him.

And there was a tension in those muscles now, as if they would explode into action if only they had

something to seize upon and rend and tear.

“Ayveh,” he said, “I have seen the mating papers. I took them from the machine to the Master a period

ago. Our request to be assigned as each other’s mate has been denied. On the basis of the Selector

Machine rating, I have been assigned to Teema, your assistant in overseeing the Master’s household, and

you to Ekno, who tends to minor repairs.”

“That ugly hairy one?” Horror almost robbed Ayveh of her voice. “Who smells so bad and is always

looking after me when I pass? No! I—I would rather kill myself first.”

“I”—there was savagery in Ayden’s words—“would rather kill the Masters!”

“Oh, no!” the girl whispered in terror. “You must not speak it. If you harmed Dmu Dran—if it became

known even that you wished to—we should all be destroyed. Not in the fuel chambers. We should go to

the example cells. And we would not die—for a long time.”

“Better that,” Aydem said stonily, “than to be slaves, to be mated to those we despise, to keep forever

our silence and obey orders, to live and die like beasts!”

Then, at Ayveh’s sudden gasp of terror, Aydem whirled.

His own features paled as he drew himself to attention. For Dmu Dran, their Master, had come silently

up behind them as they spoke, the air-suspended chair which carried him making no sound.

And Dmu Dran, his great round face blank, his large popping eyes unreadable, stared at Aydem with an

unusual intensity. Yet no thoughts were coming from the mind within the huge globular, thin-walled skull

over which only a little wispy hair, like dried hay, was plastered.

Had Dmu Dran heard? Had he caught the emanations of violent emotion which must have been spreading

all over the vicinity from Aydem? Was he now probing into their minds for the words they had just

spoken? If he knew or guessed them, their fate would be a terrible one.

But when Dmu Dran spoke—for mental communication with the undeveloped slave mind was fatiguing

for a Master—his voice was mild.

“I fear,” he said, in a thin piping tone, “that my servants are not happy. Perhaps they are upset by the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Evolution’sEndRobertArthur(1909-1969) AydemwaspushingthehummingvacuumdusteralongtheendlessstonecorridorsofthegreatundergroundRepositoryofNaturalKnowledgewhenAyveh,comingupquietlybehindhim,putherhandsoverhiseyes.Hewhirled,toseeAyveh’slaughingface,mischiefdancingonit.“Ayveh!”heexclaimedeage...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Arthur - Evolution's End.pdf

共9页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Arthur - Evolution's End

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: