Lin Carter - Green Star 2 - When The Green Star Calls

VIP免费
2024-12-23 0 0 238.44KB 84 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
When the Green Star Calls
Book 2 of the Green Star series
By Lin Carter
CONTENTS
Part 1 THE BOOK OF KARN THE HUNTER
Chapter 1 THE VOICE FROM BEYOND
Chapter 2 THE THING ON THE MOON
Chapter 3 INTO THE UNKNOWN
Chapter 4 THE DEAD CITY
Chapter 5 I LIVE AGAIN
Part 2 THE BOOK OF SARCHIMUS THE WISE
Chapter 6 THE SCARLET PYLON
Chapter 7 THE CITY OF MONSTERS
Chapter 8 THE WINGED MEN
Chapter 9 HOOM OF THE MANY EYES
Chapter 10 JANCHAN OF PHAOLON
Part 3 THE BOOK OF ZARQA THE KALOOD
Chapter 11 THE ELIXIR OF LIGHT
Chapter 12 THE SKY-SLED
Chapter 13 THE FLIGHT TO ARDHA
Chapter 14 ENTERING THE YELLOW CITY
Chapter 15 THE CRIMSON SIGN
Part 4 THE BOOK OF JANCHAN OF PHAOLON
Chapter 16 SWORDS IN THE NIGHT
Chapter 17 THE MESSENGER OF HEAVEN
Chapter 18 DANGEROUS MISSION
Chapter 19 WHEN COMRADES MEET
Chapter 20 THE THING AT THE WINDOW
Part 5 THE BOOK OF KLYGON THE ASSASSIN
Chapter 21 WINGED HORROR
Chapter 22 BLACK MASKS IN THE NIGHT
Chapter 23 THE HOUSE OF GURJAN TOR
Chapter 24 I LEARN THE ARTS OF STEALTH
Chapter 25 PROJECT THREE
Editor’s Note
Part 1
THE BOOK OF KARN THE HUNTER
Chapter 1
THE VOICE FROM BEYOND
Night after night, I heard that strange and inward call. It sang deep within me, as I tossed and
turned, striving to sleep. It called and beckoned within my troubled dreams.
From the night sky it came. From the wintry dark, where cold stars blazed like ice-blue diamonds
strewn upon black velvet. From the depths of space itself . . . from the farthest corner of the universe..
where a Green Star flamed and a weird world hung amid the void.
Like some siren, calling from the dark and silent abyss between the stars, it sang. Exquisite and pure
was the crystalline music of that siren’s song. It pulled at my heart; it sang within my very brain.
Only I alone, of all men, could hear the luring music of that voice calling from beyond; for only I, of
all men, had voyaged thither, swift as disembodied thought, to that far and fantastic world of marvel and
mystery. There, upon that strange world of eternal mists, of titanic trees and jewel-box cities, I had been
born anew in the body of a gigantic warrior of legend. Together, he and I had embarked on the strangest
adventure ever told, had ventured deep into the mist-veiled world, had loved and lost the most beautiful
of princesses.
He had died, there on the World of the Green Star.
I–I had been drawn back across the star-spaces, to my empty envelope of flesh, to the world of my
birth.
I was nearly dead when they aroused me from my trance-like slumbers. For too long had my
wandering spirit been absent from my slumbering body. Almost had the dark gates of Death opened to
receive me . . . but not quite.
For I still lived; but never could I return.
For weeks the doctors hovered about me, thrusting their needles deep into my veins, helping me to
regain my withered strength, my exhausted vitality. During the enforced leisure of my long convalescence
I passed the weary hours setting down in my journal an account of the marvels and mysteries I had
witnessed on my journey to the Green Star, and the perilous adventures I had survived on that
cloud-enveloped world of strange monsters and even stranger men.
Now, at last, they pronounced me fit and whole again. Or as fit and whole as any man may be, who
has been confined to his wheelchair, a hopeless cripple since childhood.
The narrative of my explorations and exploits on the World of the Green Star I have locked away in
a secret vault. No eye but mine shall ever look upon it until after my death; then the vault may be
opened, the narrative brought to light–and the world may make of it what it will.
The savants will scoff at its fantastic marvels, and denounce it as the ravings of a lunatic. The men of
science will put it down as an amateur’s venture into extravagant fiction; men of sanity and logic will
ascribe its origin to the cravings of a helpless cripple to play the part of a man of action, if only on the
written page.
The world may think what it likes of my tale. Only I shall ever know the truth of it, and the beauty of
Niamh, Princess of Phaolon, whom I wooed and won in the body of another man, and in his name.
I do not mean ever to return to the Green Star; there is nothing for me to go back to. Nothing but
futility and pain and sorrow . . . sorrow of broken dreams, the pain of a lost love, the futility of striving
for that which cannot be regained.
Yet night after night . . . I hear the Green Star call!
Sometimes I ask myself, why did I record that narrative of my strange adventures on a distant
world, since I mean never to voyage there again?
Perhaps it is, simply, that I wished to preserve the memory of those weird, unearthly experiences,
before they began to fade from my memory–their brilliant colors dimming, like the fresh hues of a
withering flower. I wanted to record it all as I remembered it, the awe and beauty, the strangeness and
terror, the marvelous adventure only I had lived,
But now I am not sure: it may well be that to relive the marvels and mysteries of my venture into the
unknown was a symbolic return to the Green Star–a voyage into memory, to retrace the voyage through
space that I have sworn never to perform again.
My reasons are complex and illogical. But, after all, I am only a man. Logic is cold argument in
matters of the human heart.
The trouble, quite simply, is this: I had ventured to the World of the Green Star, a disembodied
spirit, and thereon had found a body awaiting my coming–or the coming of some other spirit from the
vast deep. That body I entered, slipping into it as a hand enters a waiting glove. And thus I assumed the
body and name and identity of a mighty hero of the mythic past, the great warrior Chong, whose spirit
had been severed from its body by the malignant spells of an envious magician and cast away to drift
forever among the nameless stars.
In that body I had loved the Princess of Phaolon-Niamh the Fair–and she had returned my love!
For love of her I had been thrust into a thousand perils, battling terrific monsters and wicked men to
protect the flowerlike beauty who went ever at my side.
But in the end I had betrayed the child-woman I loved. I had failed of her trust, there at the last.
Trapped among the outlaws of the sky-tall trees, helpless to face the wrath of the Amazon girl, Siona, I
had been struck down in the hour of ultimate peril. And I had died, there on the World of the Green Star
. . . leaving my princess helpless and alone amid a thousand terrors, hunted on all sides by merciless and
ruthless enemies . . . while my sad soul went drifting back to the body it had left behind, on the planet of
its birth!
How could I return to that far world again–and for what reason? To float, a disembodied spirit, in
homage before the tomb of the girl I loved? Or to look on, helplessly, as she struggled against dangers
and foes against which my hovering spirit was but a wisp of air?
These things were undeniably true–yet reason and sanity and logic are poor solace for a tormented
heart. By day the memory of my lost love haunted my waking hours and by night, the Green Star called
like a siren through my dreams . . .
Life on the planet of my birth held little to interest me. True, I am young and handsome, and wealthy
–as most men measure wealth. The first is an accident of heredity, the second a matter of inheritance–
neither have anything to do with me.
Crippled with polio as a child, in the years before the perfection of the Salk vaccine, I could live out
my years in comfortable boredom, surrounded by every luxury that money can buy. The fortune of my
father, the country estate of my family, these both are mine to enjoy. But I chafe against the weary futility
of this life of cushioned ease; I yearn to be thrust into the wilderness, pitting my strength and courage and
cunning against a thousand perils. For only in such moments have I found life worth living.
I was born for the life of wandering adventure . . . but fate chained me to the body of a hopeless
cripple.
It was this longing for escape that first drove me to pursue the curious art the Oriental sages call
eckankar–soul-travel–the liberation of the astral body. The secrets of that lost art were set down in Old
Uighur in a strange and precious book written immeasurable ages before Narmer the Lion welded the
Two Lands together under one crown, and Egypt was born.
With the resources of vast wealth mine to draw upon at will, I commissioned agents to scour the
East for any trace of that age-lost and world-forgotten book. Seven years and two hundred thousand
dollars later, it was found in an obscure, minor lamasery. Lost in the confusion when the Dalai Lama and
his court fled the invading Red Chinese for refuge in India, the ancient codex had gone astray.
But wealth can open many a long-closed door. And thus, at last, the mysterious Kan Chan Ga
came into my hands. In those parchment pages, a prehistoric sage had set down the occult wisdom of a
forgotten civilization . . . with time, I made that wisdom mine.
Now that I had again regained the strength of body, mind, and soul, I hungered to taste the ecstasy
of astral flight again . . . yearned for the intoxicating freedom to venture into far places, a drifting, invisible
spirit!
Perhaps only one crippled as I am, can fully understand the intolerable lust for that freedom. One
who, like me, has not taken a step since he was six years old, without mechanical aids. One who will
never walk the world in this life, in this body . . . save through the timeless magic science locked in the
cryptic pages of the Kan Chan Ga.
Day after day, I fought against that hunger.
Night after night, the Green Star called from the starry deeps!
And so it came to pass that, one winter’s night, I could resist no longer the summons of the Green
Star.
I pretended to myself that I would merely venture upon this world . . . to see the Coliseum by
moonlight, the Sphinx by dawn, the Taj Mahal under the brilliant noon.
I prepared myself for the adventure.
My suite is in a private wing of the old house in Connecticut that has borne my family’s name since
1790. Many is the time I have locked myself in my rooms for days on end, busy with my books, the
servants forbidden to disturb my solitude.
This time should be no different.
My precautions taken, my housekeeper informed to avoid disturbing me on any pretext, I stretched
out upon my bed and composed my limbs as if for slumber.
I emptied my mind of all trivial thoughts by the recitation of certain mantras. Closing my eyes, I
visualized an ebon sphere, and fixed my attention upon it unwaveringly.
Gradually, so complete was my inner concentration, I lost all sense of my body.
All outer sensation faded. My extremities became numb. My chest rose and fell as, I deliberately
breathed shallowly, and slowed my heartbeat by an effort of disciplined will.
I was now in a self-induced state of light trance.
Fixing my attention upon that black sphere, I now saw that it was not a material globe at all, but the
circular entrance of a dark, unlit tunnel.
Into the mouth of that tunnel I fell.
Utter darkness swallowed me.
Deeper and deeper I descended into that black tunnel. At length, after an inestimable period of
time, I perceived a minute flicker of light beneath me.
It was the light at the end of the tunnel.
I emerged from the darkness . . . and found myself floating in a dreamlike haze of unearthly silver
radiance and absolute blackness.
For a long, wondering moment, I stared about myself.
For a moment I could not recognize my weird surroundings.
Then it came across my mind like a flash that what I looked upon was a broad, sloping lawn,
mantled in new-fallen snow, and the jeweled blackness of a midnight sky, arching above me.
Looking past the snowy expanse, I saw a great old house of rugged fieldstone, with tall towers and
a peaked roof.
The house was my own.
I seemed to be floating sixty or seventy feet above the Earth, weightless as a gust of air.
From a gemmed black sky, wherein the silver rondure of a full moon blazed with glacial splendor,
snow fell in shimmering flakes through an utter stillness.
The snowflakes fell . . . through me!
And then I knew my soul was free.
Chapter 2
THE THING ON THE MOON
Above, like a great jewel pinned to the breast of night, the full moon glowed with unearthly silver
light.
A bodiless spirit, I could travel where I willed, swift as thought itself, faster than any beam of light.
To the moon itself, if I wished.
The thought entranced me. The moon glowed down like a staring and hypnotic eye. Men of my
race had trod those cindery plains, and now would tread there no more. The last Apollo flight had
departed from Taurus-Littrow and a chapter of history had closed . . . for our era, at least.
So the commentators said.
But I could prove them wrong, if I so willed.
The wish was father to the act. Even as the thought occurred to me, it seemed that I soared
skyward at incredible velocity. The snowscape fell away beneath me, laced with black woods and
webbed with spidery-thin lines that were highways, and jeweled, here and there, by the dwindling
light-clusters that were towns.
Earth fell away beneath me until it transformed itself into a tremendous globe, sheathed in midnight.
A diamond-glitter flickered; an arc of light circled the east. Then the daylight terminator blazed up in a
dazzle of sunlight and I watched a dawn still hours in the future travel slowly across the Atlantic Ocean;
an orb of incredible flame mirrored on a shield of burning gold.
I turned my vision skyward, and saw the moon.
Very beautiful it was, the immense face peering down at me as if puzzled to see a drifting spirit
afloat on the soundless ether.
I ascended very high above the Earth.
I was not conscious of the slightest sensation. A man in my place would be a frozen corpse in the
hundredth part of a second, the breath exploding from his lungs to freeze into a diamond-mist of ice
particles. But I felt neither cold nor the need to breathe.
Those sensations I had left behind in my body, which slept in a trance many thousands of miles
away, in a night-shrouded place called Connecticut.
And I–I was free! Free to span the very universe in a twinkling, if I wished!
Now the moon expanded before me, filling the horizon like a tremendous bowl. No more did I
ascend skyward; now it seemed that I floated down into a colossal plain of glittering cracked glass,
where a huge, black-ringed crater glared like a sightless eye.
The crater must have been miles across: the rays of sheeted glass that extended from it were like
frozen rivers, flashing in the blinding sun.
Toward the black-ringed crater I descended.
And a moment later I seemed to stand in a great valley. To all sides, the horizon was ringed in by a
jagged but circular and unbroken wall.
I looked down. The floor of the crater was naked rock, with a dull metallic sheen. It was littered
with crumbling fragments of debris, and pockmarked with many craterlets, dozens, perhaps hundreds.
These differed in size from pits you could hide a Cadillac in, to small, circular holes only an inch or
two across. The floor of the crater looked like a flat surface of heavy, slick mud upon which scattered
raindrops had fallen–and the mud had then been frozen forever, preserving the impact craters.
The debris that lay tumbled about consisted of shards and fragments of broken rock–doubtless
hurled about by whatever had scored the flat plain with those miniature craterlets; a meteor shower, I
guessed.
The silence was unearthly.
Here there was no air, no rain, no snow. Nothing but the pitiless glare of eternal day, relieved by the
transient darkness of eclipse, when the Earth passed between moon and sun.
Like a homeless ghost in Dante’s Inferno, I roamed the floor of this hell of frozen stone and glaring
star’s.
And then I came upon a wonder.
It was set in the stone floor of the crater-plain. It soared ten or a dozen feet into the sky.
It was a pillar of iron.
Struck with awe, I drifted closer to look upon this marvel with the eyeless vision of the spirit I now
was.
The metal thing was about two feet in diameter, as nearly as I could judge with the eye alone,
having nothing of known size nearby against which to measure it.
The iron pillar was perfectly rounded and burnished smooth. I call it iron for want of a better word;
a dark, blue-black metal, very reflective. If it was not iron, then I can put no name to the metal which
composed it.
It was no freak of nature, this shining column of metal that thrust up against the flaring stars. Such
perfection of rondure, such straightness, could not have been natural by any stretch of the imagination.
This was the work of man.
Peering closer, I saw the sides of the column were incised with narrow rows of cryptic letters.
Strange, hooked characters they were, and like no Terrene alphabet of the many known to me.
If anything, they resembled Sanskrit.
I wondered whose hand had set this thing here, and for what unguessable purpose.
And what was the meaning of the inscription?
Were these the annals of a race unknown, star-wandering visitors from another solar system,
envoys from the dim red spark of distant Mars?
Or had some prehistoric civilization of Earth’s forgotten dawn traversed the silent abyss between
the worlds? Had some crystal vehicle from elder Mu drifted here before the birth of time, or some primal
astronaut from lost Atlantis, risen through the seething mists of the Pleistocene, to dare the depths of
space,
There was no answer I could put to these questions.
The iron column may have stood here a million years or more, bearing mute testimony to some
vanished race that had been the first to voyage between the planets.
In the perfect vacuum of the moon’s surface, iron would stand eternal and unrusting, durable for
eternity.
Were these mysterious inscriptions the imperishable chronicles of Mars in her prime, or a lost book
from Atlantis? Was this message a greeting, flung across the aeons, or a timeless warning of some
cosmic danger?
Absurdly, I thought of a “no trespassing” sign, such as Earthly farmers affix to tree or fence-post.
Was the pillar of iron a warning to the men of my world that this satellite fell within the borders of some
interplanetary empire?
Or was it, perhaps, a gravestone–the marker of some fallen king or hero of the Tertiary–inscribed
with the record of his deeds?
Many, I knew, are the mysteries of time and space. Man has yet encountered but a few.
The Gupcha Lama–seventh of the “living gods” of Tibet–he who had translated the mysterious
pages of the Kan Chan Ga into English for me, on my promise to deliver the priceless original codex to
the Dalai Lama when the task was done. had confided to me many things during our peculiar friendship.
He had told me of one certain very ancient lamasery in a forgotten corner of Tibet, called
Quanguptoy. There for a thousand years and more successive generations of mystery-priests had
studied an age-old science by which pure thought can be made to traverse immensities of space.
The Quanguptoy lamasery had for centuries exchanged wisdom and knowledge with the strange
denizens of far-off worlds, he confided. With a white, crawling, fungoid intelligence that dwelt on the
twilight zone of tiny Mercury. With a sentient crystalloid entity who inhabited one of the lesser moons of
Saturn. With a forgotten race of Insect Philosophers who once had lived in the moon’s core but died
when the last oxygen reserves were exhausted–and who thrust their immaterial minds forth into the
remote future, to assume the bodies of a post-human race of segmented arthropods who will inherit the
Earth in One Hundred Million A.D.
The telepathic lamas had devoted a thousand years to the projection of thought, and from many
distant worlds and strange beings had compiled a history of the universe itself.
An entity of living gas, who dwelt beyond the galaxy near the surface of a dead, wandering star,
told them of the future, which it had explored by the sheer power of mind alone. Told them of man’s
eventual extinction in an Age of Ice due in twenty-five thousand years; told them how the surviving
remnant of mankind would migrate to Sirius and Tau Ceti from subterranean citadels, as Earth’s
core-heat failed at last, guttering to darkness in the thirtieth century of the Ice Age. Told them how the
first visitors from the young planets of Alpha Draconis, come flown hither in crude rocketships of
indestructible crystal, would puzzle over the indecipherable mysteries of ruined New York and drowned
Chicago and lava-sealed San Francisco, when at last the glaciers receded.
Strange beyond the dreams of science fiction are the unplumbed mysteries of the universe!
There is a wizard who dwells on a dead world about Antares, in a dome of imperishable glass built
above a mighty chasm wherein scarlet horrors slither hungrily. The last of his race he is, and that race
sprung from the reptiles as we are sprung from the great apes. It is his peculiar curse that he is eternal
and deathless, having in a rash moment immortalized himself. He has outlived the extinction of all his
kind, and will live on until the energy-death of the universe itself, when the galaxy slows and comes
apart, and the stars go out, one by one.
I turned from the iron enigma that stood against the stars, and drifted on my solitary way.
Perhaps no eye but mine would ever scan those rows of unreadable hieroglyphs. The mystery of the
thing on the moon might never be solved.
I left it, thrusting up against the starry sky.
And in that sky–the Green Star blazed!
I saw it lift beyond the naked, fang-like peaks of the dead cold lunar horizon.
I knew it at once, with an instinctive recognition I can neither justify nor explain. And my heart
leaped within me at the sight of that spark of emerald flame. For on that far world lay my destiny, my
triumph–or my doom.
Whatever jest of mocking gods had spun the tangled skein of my days had woven into the woof a
thread of jeweled green. Like it or not, my fate was inextricably involved with the fate of the distant folk
who dwelt on that far world.
And all at once a longing surged within my soul to visit again that weird world of many marvels. This
desire was all but irresistible, and in its rising flood were swept away all of my wise and cautious
arguments.
I must venture again to the World of the Green Star, where, in the body of another man, I had lived
the most perilous and fantastic adventures in all the annals of human experience.
I must . . . and there was nothing I left behind me on Earth that I could not do without.
Why did I hesitate–why did I linger? Every fiber of my being yearned to drift through that world
encompassing forest of sky-tall trees, where a delicate and ancient people dwelt in precarious balance
between implacable foes and ferocious monsters. Where cities of sparkling gems soared from the
bowers of branches that sprung miles into a misty sky shot through with sunbeams of mingled jade and
gold . . . a world of unearthly beauty and superhuman, mystery, where my heart had, at last, come home.
I had nothing to lose by going, except my life.
And I placed little enough value on that, God knows . . .
Chapter 3
INTO THE UNKNOWN
One last glance I cast behind me at the world on which I had been born. I said my silent farewells
to her green hills and dim forests and shining seas, to the people I had known and loved, to familiar
places and moments that would live in memory. My regrets were few, for most of the memories were
bitter. But there were certain things I put behind me now that it would sadden me never to know again . .
. the taste of a fresh spring morning in the woods of Connecticut; the familiar feel of an old, much-read,
long-loved book; the portrait of my mother, smiling, lovely, forever youthful with the immortality of the
painter’s art, that hung above the mantle in the dining room; the carefully-tended grave of a great, lovable
Newfoundland who had been the faithful companion of my childhood . . .
These things I might never look upon again.
I made them my farewells.
Then I looked beyond the white-flecked azure sphere of the Earth to that place in the eternal
blackness of the heavens where the Green Star blazed like a beacon-fire against the dark.
And I left my world behind forever.
Somehow I knew that I would not return again to that strong but crippled body that slept in an
unbreakable trance in the dark room of the old house that had been home to my people for a little less
than two hundred years. How I could be certain of this I could not say. But the inner conviction was
very strong.
Staring into the black sky with the eyes of my spirit-body, I willed myself to the Green Star with all
the force of will I had learned from my patient study of the old book from Tibet.
And the dead surface of the moon fell away beneath me–dwindled to a shining mote that hung
beside a shrinking sphere of glittering blue–and vanished into the darkness between the stars.
The transition was timeless. That is, I was not aware of any lapse of time. My second flight to the
Green Star, like my first, may have taken a moment–or a century. There was no way to measure the
interval.
I have come to feel that a sense of the passing of time is an illusion of the flesh, not an absolute
universal standard. The wise men of Lhasa teach that both time and space–the sense of distance and of
interval–are delusions imposed upon the spirit which is imprisoned in a human body. They teach that to
the liberated soul there is only the eternal and the infinite: no bounds, no limits, an endless Now . . . and
an uncircumscribed Everywhere. As to the truth of this, I really cannot say. But I suspect that, in this as
in certain other things, the timeless wisdom of the East has attained to an insight denied the little men of
the West who huddle in narrow laboratories, probing at the secrets of the universe with narrow minds,
minds too small to contain the measureless Truth.
There was no sensation of motion.
I was momentarily aware of an infinite darkness closing about me. The icy breath of a supernal cold
touched the center of my being. The stars blurred . . . and shifted . . .
And the Green Star blazed up before me in all the glory of her tremendous dawn!
It was a spectacle such as few eyes could ever have seen. The star-strewn vastness of space was
filled with a vast sphere of intolerable emerald flame. Thundering gouts of incandescent spume, like a
fiery vapor of jade, blazed up from the shimmering surface of the immense orb . . . floated in arcs of
unendurable brilliance against the dark . . . and sank again into the green furnace of the tremendous sun.
I stared enthralled upon the scene. How it was that I could look upon this cataclysmic vision of
wonder and might I cannot explain. Had I been a fleshly visitor, my organs of vision would have been
blinded in the first microsecond. As an invisible and bodiless spirit, it seems to me that I employed the
eyes of my astral senses, but this is only a guess. However it was that an immaterial form can sense the
vibrations of light–I saw. It is but one of the many enigmas of the bodiless state, and the solution of it I
must leave to wiser men than I.
Circling this sphere of cold green fire I spied a smaller globe, sheathed in impenetrable silver mists.
This was the world whereon I had ventured in the person of Chong the Mighty . . . and how my heart
sprang with joy now that I beheld it again!
I directed the flight of my spirit toward it.
Nacreous, dawn-struck mists swirled up around me: for a long moment I sank through mists of
turbulent vapors of spun silver, irradiated with fiery emerald.
Then the mists dispersed about me and whipped away, and I looked upon a landscape such as
Earthly eyes have never beheld before my coming.
It was a world of Brobdingnagian trees. In their countless tens of thousands they marched from
horizon to mist bound horizon, and most of them were as tall as Everest. Mountain-thick boles sprung
from unseen depths beneath to fling their towering spires against the green-and-silver sky. Enormous
branches sprouted from the soaring trunks, branches as broad as six-lane highways, bearing up immense
clouds of leafage. These leaves were as huge as the sails of ships, and were like gold tissue struck
through with sun.
It was an awesome spectacle; once seen it could never be forgotten. Earth affords no mightier,
more impressive landscape.
Through the maze of intertwining branches I floated down as lightly as a drifting leaf.
Branches thrust about me now in every direction. Here and there a scarlet reptile clung with
sucker-feet to the rough bark surface. An immense dragonfly shot past me, his wings of sheeted opal
flashed suddenly with jeweled splendor as he transected a shaft of green-gold sunlight. I could see about
half a mile in every direction . . . beyond that limit, branches and masses of aureate leafage blocked my
vision.
I gazed down: the trunks of the colossal trees dwindled away beneath me like the shafts of
skyscrapers, their bases lost in the dense gloom that reigned eternal at the forest’s floor.
I did not have even the slightest idea where I was. And it suddenly came to me that in this
mysterious world of titan forests, one tree looks very like another. On my earlier trip here, I had been
lucky enough to stumble upon the site of Phaolon, Jewel City of Niamh, through pure chance. Now,
unless the Gods of Luck were with me, I had not the slightest chance of finding it again. Nor, for that
matter, of finding the Secret City of the Outlaws, where I had taken my last look at the princess, and
where, in the body of Chong the Mighty, I had been slain.
Phaolon or the Secret City might be on the next branch–or ten thousand miles away! I floated for a
time, musing on this problem, realizing it was hopelessly insoluble.
Princess Niamh and I had been in the act of making our escape from the outlaw encampment of
Siona the Huntress. The Amazon girl, who had foolishly conceived an unreciprocated passion for me,
had been on the point of delivering the princess into the hands of certain envoys from her rival city of
Ardha. We had fought our way out of Siona’s fortress to the zaiph pens. In that battle I had received my
摘要：

WhentheGreenStarCallsBook2oftheGreenStarseriesByLinCarterCONTENTSPart1THEBOOKOFKARNTHEHUNTERChapter1THEVOICEFROMBEYONDChapter2THETHINGONTHEMOONChapter3INTOTHEUNKNOWNChapter4THEDEADCITYChapter5ILIVEAGAINPart2THEBOOKOFSARCHIMUSTHEWISEChapter6THESCARLETPYLONChapter7THECITYOFMONSTERSChapter8THEWINGEDMEN...

展开>> 收起<<
Lin Carter - Green Star 2 - When The Green Star Calls.pdf

共84页,预览17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！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：84 页 大小：238.44KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

高考理综 人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 84
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注