Bob Shaw - Palace of Eternity

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 390.43KB 265 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

BOB SHAW

The Palace of Eternity

GRAFTON BOOKS

A Division of the Collins Publishing Group

PART ONE

The Humans

In spite of all his efforts, Tavernor was unable to remain

indoors when it was time for the sky to catch fire.

Tension had been gnawing at his stomach for most of

the evening, and the repair job on the boat turbine

seemed to have grown progressively more difficult,

although he knew it was simply that his concentration

was failing. Finally, he laid his welding pistol down and

switched off the lights above the workbench.

Immediately there was a nervous fluttering among the

caged leatherwings at the opposite end of the long room.

The compact, bat-like creatures disliked any sudden

change in light intensity. Tavernor went to the cage and

steadied it with his 'hands, feeling the wires vibrate like

harpstrings under his fingers. He put his face close to the

cage, swallowing as the-cool air from the wingbeats caught

in his throat, and projected his thoughts towards the

squeaking, silver-eyed mammals.

Be calm, little friends. All is well. All is well. . .

The clamour within the cage ceased almost at once, and

the leatherwings returned to their perches, the mercury-

specks of their eyes shining at him in the similitude of

intelligence.

'That's better,' Tavernor whispered, aware that the

creatures' telepathic faculties had picked up the under-

currents of his own edginess.

He locked the workshop door behind him, crossed the

living room and went out of the single-storey building

into the warm October night. The year on Mnemosyne

had almost five hundred days, and there were no seasons,

but men had carried their own calendars into space.

Back on Earth's northern hemisphere, trees were being

transmuted to copper and gold - so it was October on

Mnemosyne, and a hundred other colonized worlds.

Tavernor checked the time with his watch. Less than

five minutes to go.

He took his pipe from his pocket, loaded it with moist

strands of tobacco and lit up. The ignited glowing shreds

on top writhed upwards and Taverhor pressed them down

with a work-hardened fingertip, calming himself with the

rites of patience. He leaned against the wall of the

darkened house while the smoke carried its message of

sanity away on the night air. Tavernor imagined the

fragrance reaching into nests and burrows in the surround-

ing forest, and wondered what their furry inhabitants

would make of it. They had had barely a hundred years

to get used to humanity's presence on their world, and -

with the exception of the leatherwings - had maintained

a sombre, watchful reserve.

At two minutes before zero hour Tavernor transferred

his attention to the sky. The heavens above Mnemosyne

were unlike those of any planet he had ever visited. Many

geological ages earlier two large moons had coursed

overhead, drawing closer and closer together until they

had collided. Traces of that cosmic impact could be found

all over the planet in the form of vast meteorite craters,

but the main evidence was in the sky.

A shell of lunar fragments - many of them large enough

for their irregularity of outline to be visible to the naked

eye - constantly drifted on the background of fainter

stars, forming a curtain that reached from pole to pole.

The pattern of brilliant shards never repeated itself, and

adding to the spectacle was the fact. that the screen was

dense enough for eclipses to take place on a continuous

basis. As Mnemosyne's shadow swept across the sky

groups of moonlets would pass from white right through

the colours of the spectrum, vanish into blackness, then

reappear, to run the penumbral gamut in reverse.

Against a sky like that, even a first magnitude star was

difficult to pick out, but Tavernor knew exactly where to

look. His eyes fastened on the single, wavering speck of

light that was Neilson's Star. Almost seven light years

distant, it was lost in the kaleidoscope of Mnemosyne's

night sky, but its insignificance was soon to be a thing of

the past. -

As the final seconds ticked away, the tension inside

Tavernor's guts increased until he could feel it as a hard'

bullet of apprehension. I'm indulging this thing, he told

himself. After all, the event itself took place seven years

ago. That was when Earth's Stellar Engineering Corps

(the vast egotism of the title never failed to dismay

Tavernor) had selected Neilson's Star, noting with

approval that it was of the classical type for their purpose.

A close binary, the popularized reports had stated. Princi-

pal component, in the giant sequence of the Hertzsprung-

Russell diagram; secondary component, small and dense;

planets, none. Prognosis for modific{ltion: excellent.

That was when the Corps' great butterfly ships had

come swarming on their magnetic wings, surrounding the

doomed giant, raking its surface with the spiteful stings

of their lasers, pouring in energy at gamma ray frequen-

cies until the flux reached insupportable intensities,

until. . .

Tavernor's teeth clenched on the mouthpiece of his

pipe as - with the suddenness of a room lamp being

switched on - the house, the surrounding forest, the

distant mountain ranges, the whole sky, were bathed in

hard white light. Its source was Neilson's Star, which was

now a point of searing brilliance so fierce that he had to

jerk his eyes away from it. Even at the distance of

seven light years the nova's initial fury could have pricked

through his retinas. Forgive us, he thought, please forgive

us.

The forest lay still for a disbelieving moment, as though

stunned by the nova's intangible hammer-blow, then it

erupted in protest against this supremely unnatural event.

A billion wings beat the air in a kind of diffused explosion.

The flood of light pouring down from the transformed

sky was dimmed momentarily as every creature capable

of flight projected itself into the air, wheeled, and darted

for safety. Their concerted defiance of gravity gave Tav-

ernor the fleeting sensation that it was he that was sinking;

and then the sound reached him. Screams, squawks,

whistles, whimpers, roars, clicks, hisses, combined with

the flurry of wings, clatter of dry leaves, scampering of

feet, followed by . . .

Utter silence. .

The forest watched and waited.

Tavernor found himself gripped by the ghastly stillness,

reduced to the level of one of Mnemosyne's forest crea-

tures, virtually mindless, yet he had in that moment a

sense of being aware of Life's relationship to the space-

time continuum in a way that men no longer understood.

The vast and transparent parameters of th.e eternal prob-

lem seemed to parade on the surface of the gestalt mind

of which he might suddenly have become a part. Life.

Death. Eternity. The numinous. Panspermism. Tavernor

felt a tremendous elation. Panspermism - the concept of

ubiquitous life. Justification for believing that every mind

in existence was linked to every other mind that had ever

been? If so, then novae and supernovae were only too

well understood by the quivering inhabitants of the dark

burrows and shielded nests around him. How many times

in this galaxy alone had a star gone berserk? A million

times? And in the eternity of galaxies? How many civiliza-

tions, how many incomputible billions of lives had been

blasted out of existence by the star-death? And had each

being, intelligent or otherwise, in that last withering

second, fed the same message into the panspermic all-

mind, making it available to every sentient creature that

would ever exist in the continuum's dark infinities? Look

out, little brother, whether you walk, crawl, swim, burrow

or fly - when the sky suddenly floods with light, make

your peace, make your peace. . .

Tavernor felt his elation increase - he was on the brink of

understanding something important - and then, because

the emotion was a product of his individuality, the nebu-

lous contact was lost, with an accelerating yearning slide

into normalcy., There was a moment of disappointment,

but even that vanished into something less than a

memory. He re-lit his pipe and tried to get used to the

altered appearance of his surroundings. Statements issued

by the War Bureau had said that for two weeks Neilson's

Star would become about a million times brighter than

before, but would nonetheless still be ten thousand times

less brilliant than Mnemosyne's own sun. The effect was

similar to bright moonlight on Earth, Tavernor realized.

Only the suddenness of the illumination had made it

awesome, after all- the suddenness and his knowledge of

the deadly purpose behind it.

The sound of a ground effect machine approaching

from the direction of the Centre disturbed Tavernor's

reverie. Tuning his ears to the engine note, he recognized

the smoothly expensive whine of Lissa Grenoble's per-

sonal machine even before he saw its headlights splaying

their topaz fingers through the trees. His heart began to

thud steadily and peacefully. He remained immobile until

the vehicle had almost reached the house, then became

aware that he was deliberately trying to display the

attributes she most admired in him - solidity, self-suffici-

ency, brooding, physical power. There's no fool like a

middle-aged fool, he thought, as he shouldered himself

off the wall.

He caught the handle of the passenger door and stead-

ied the machine as it sank to the ground. Lissa got out at

the far side, smiling whitely. As always, the sight of her

almost-too-rounded body and almost-too-full lips turned

his inside into a volcano which had its base somewhere in

his loins and its flame-belching apex right behind his eyes.

'Engine still sounds good,' he remarked, for want of

something better to say.

Lissa Grenoble was the daughter of Howard Grenoble,

the planetary administrator, but Tavernor had met her in

the same way that he usually met people in Mnemosyne -

through being asked to repair a machine. The planet was

virtually without metallic deposits, and no butterfly ship

could ply through its shell of lunar fragments with cargo

from Earth or any of the nearer manufacturing centres.

So even Mnemosyne's first family, which was also its

richest, preferred to pay for repeated repairs to an older

vehicle, rather than go to the fantastic expense of import-

ing a new one by way of butterfly ship, orbital station and

reaction-powered stage ship.

'Of course the engine sounds good,' Lissa replied

lightly. 'you made it better than new, didn't you?'

'You've been reading my promotion literature.' Tav-

ernor was flattered in spite of himself.

Lissa came round the vehicle, caught his arm and

leaned against him, purposefully. He kissed her once,

drinking in the incredible reality of her the way a thirsting

man gulps his first draught of water. Her tongue felt hot,

hotter than any human's ought to feel.

'Hey!' He broke away from her. 'You started early

tonight.'

'What do you mean, Mack?' Lissa pouted beautifully.

'Sparks. You've been drinking sparks.'

'Don't be silly. Do I smell of sparks1'

Tavernor sniffed doubtfully, twisting his head away as

she playfully tried to nip the end of his nose. The volatil~,

meadows-in-summer aroma of sparks was absent, but he

was not quite satisfied. He never drank the dream-liquor

himself, preferring whiskey - another reminder that Lissa

was nineteen and he was exactly thirty years older. People

no longer showed their age much, so there was no

physical barrier between them; but the years were there

in his mind just the same.

'Let's go inside,' he said. 'Away from this ghastly light.'

'Ghastly? I think it's romantic.'

Tavernor frowned. Lissa was laying it on too thick.

'Romantic. You know what it means?' He glanced up at

the intense point of light, now easily the most prominent

object in the sky, which Neilson's Star had become.

'Yes, of course. It means they're opening a high-speed

commericallane to Mnemosyne.'

'No.' Tavernor felt his tension return. 'The war's

coming this way.'

'Now you are being silly.'

Lissa tugged his arm and they went into the house.

Tavernor reached for the light switch, but she stayed his

hand, closing with him again. He responded instinctively,

then that part of his mind which never relaxed its guard

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：

BOBSHAW ThePalaceofEternity GRAFTONBOOKS ADivisionoftheCollinsPublishingGroup PARTONETheHumans 1 Inspiteofallhisefforts,Tavernorwasunabletoremainindoorswhenitwastimefortheskytocatchfire.Tensionhadbeengnawingathisstomachformostoftheevening,andtherepairjobontheboatturbineseemedtohavegrownprogres...

展开>> 收起<<

Bob Shaw - Palace of Eternity.pdf

共265页,预览53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！

Bob Shaw - Palace of Eternity

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: