R. A. Lafferty - Sky

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 28.64KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Sky.txt

VERSION 1.0 dtd 032700

R. A. LAFFERTY

sky

RAPHAEL ALOYSIUS LAFFERTY was born November 7, 1914, at Neola, Iowa, of Irish parents. Self-

educated, he became an electrical engineer by way of a correspondence course and then worked for

thirty-five years for electrical wholesalers before retiring to devote his time to writing.

He first tried to write when he was nineteen, and an editor scribbled on his rejected manuscript,

"Hopeless, you don't know what life is. Live it for twenty-five years and try again." He forgot that

advice until long afterward and then discovered that he had followed it almost exactly. He has six

published science fiction novels: Past Master, The Reefs of Earth, Space Chantey, Fourth Mansions, The

Devil Is Dead and Arrive at Easterwine; and two historical fantasies: The Flame /s Green and The Fall

of Rome. There are two published collections of his science fiction stories: Nine Hundred Grandmothers

and Strange Doings. He has had more than eighty stories published in magazines or original collections,

and half of them have been anthologized.

His hobbies are geology, art, languages and history. He modestly disclaims any sort of competence

despite the fact that he has a reading knowledge of all the languages of the Latin, German and Slavic

families, as well as Gaelic and Greek, and during his military service in World

War II he learned to speak Pasar Malay and Tagalog.

Three of his novels, Past Master, Fourth Mansions and The Devil Is Dead, have been Nebula Award

finalists, as was his novelette "Continued on the Next Rock." A Lafferty extravaganza views the

universe madly, as with a distorting mirror, but the piercing sanity of the result reminds one that chaos,

distorted, can be disconcertingly real.

The Sky-Seller was Mr. Furtive himself, fox-muzzled, ferret eyed, slithering along like a snake, and

living under the Rocks. The Rocks had not been a grand place for a long time. It had been built in the

grand style on a mephitic plot of earth (to transform it), but the mephitic earth had won out. The

apartments of the Rocks had lost their sparkle as they had been divided again and again, and now they

were shoddy. The Rocks had weathered. Its once pastel hues were now dull grays and browns.,

The five underground levels had been parking places for motor vehicles when those were still common,

but now these depths were turned into warrens and hovels. The Sky-Seller lurked and lived in the lowest

and smallest and meanest of them all.

He came out only at night. Daylight would have killed him: he knew that. He sold out of the darkest

shadows of the night. He had only a few (though oddly select) clients, and nobody knew who his

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswij...jn%20documenten/spaar/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Sky.txt (1 of 11)23-2-2006 22:42:40

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Sky.txt

supplier was. He said that he had no supplier, that he gathered and made the stuff himself.

Welkin Alauda, a full-bodied but light-moving girl (it was said that her bones here hollow and filled

with air), came to the Sky Seller just before first light, just when he had become highly nervous but had

not yet bolted to his underground.

"A sack of Sky from the nervous mouse. Jump, or the sun will gobble your house!" Welkin sang-song,

and she was already higher than most skies.

"Hurry, hurry!" the Sky-Seller begged, thrusting the sack to her while his black eyes trembled and

glittered (if real light should ever reflect into them he'd go blind).

Welkin took the sack of Sky, and scrambled money notes into his hands, which had furred palms.

(Really? Yes, really.)

"World be flat and the Air be round, wherever the Sky grows underground," Welkin intoned, taking the

sack of Sky and soaring along with a light scamper of feet (she hadn't much weight, her bones were

hollow). And the Sky-Seller darted headfirst down a black well shaft thing to his depths.

Four of them went Sky-Diving that morning, Welkin herself, Karl Vlieger, Icarus Riley, Joseph Alzarsi;

and the pilot was-(no, not who you think, he had already threatened to turn them all in; they'd use that

pilot no more)-the pilot was Ronald Kolibri in his little crop dusting plane.

But a crop-duster will not go up to the frosty heights they liked to take off from. Yes it will-if everybody

is on Sky. But it isn't pressurized, and it doesn't carry oxygen. That doesn't matter, not if everybody is on

Sky, not if the plane is on Sky too.

Welkin took Sky with Mountain Whizz, a carbonated drink. Karl stuffed it into his lip like snuff. Icarus

Riley rolled it and smoked it. Joseph Alzarsi needled it, mixed with drinking alcohol, into his main vein.

The pilot Ronny-tongued and chewed it like sugar dust. The plane named Shrike took it through the

manifold.

Fifty thousand feet-You can't go that high in a crop-duster. Thirty below zero-Ah, that isn't cold! Air too

thin to breathe at all-with Sky, who needs such included things as air?

Welkin stepped out, and went up, not down. It was a trick she often pulled. She hadn't much weight; she

could always get higher than the rest of them. She went up and up until-she disappeared. Then she

drifted down again, completely enclosed in a sphere of ice crystal, sparkling inside it and making

monkey faces at them.

The wind yelled and barked, and the divers took off. They all went down, soaring and gliding and

tumbling; standing still sometimes, it seemed; even rising again a little. They went down to clouds and

spread out on them: black-white clouds with the sun inside them and suffusing them both from above

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswij...jn%20documenten/spaar/R.%20A.%20Lafferty%20-%20Sky.txt (2 of 11)23-2-2006 22:42:40

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

R. A. Lafferty - Sky.pdf

共11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！

R. A. Lafferty - Sky

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: