The Ancient Shadows lfteot-3 Read online

  The Ancient Shadows

  ( Legends from the End of Time - 3 )

  Michael Moorcock

  Цикл о Крае Времени весьма необычен. Это не фэнтези, это не научная фантастика в обычном смысле этого термина, это - нечто иное.

  Край Времени - это когда "дни вселенной были сочтены". Герои этого цикла - люди, хотя человеческого в них не сильно много. Они всемогущи, а если их настигает смерть, то они легко могут возродиться, а главное - они не живут, они скорее играют в жизнь. Играют в любовь, в страдания, играют во что угодно, лишь бы занять время. Беспрерывные развлечения - вот смысл их жизни. Цикл полон языковых изысков, необычных способов построения речи и сюжета, странных имен героев, но при этом читается просто отлично.

  Легенды Края Времени - это сборник повестей о Крае Времени, позволяющий получше узнать обитателей этого столь необычного мира. Именно эти истории вскользь упоминались в Танцорах. Среди них: история греха Вертера де Гёте, рассказ о дуэли Лорда Акулы Неизвестного и, на мой взгляд, лучшая повесть о материнской любви и сыновнем непонимании...

  "Танелорн: Всё о Майкле Муркоке" http://www.moorcock.narod.ru/

  The Ancient Shadows

  BY MICHAEL MOORCOCK

  Book 3 of the Legends from the End of Time

  In ancient shadows and twilights

  Where childhood had stray'd ,

  The world's great sorrows were born

  And its heroes were made .

  In the lost boyhood of Judas

  Christ was betray'd .

  G. W. Russell

  "Germinal"

  1. A Stranger to the End of Time

  Upon the shore of a glowing chemical lake, peering through a visor of clouded Perspex, a stranger stood, her dark features showing profound awe and some disapproval, while behind her there rustled and gibbered a city, half-organic in its decadence, palpitating with obscure colours, poisonous and powerful. And overhead, in the sallow sky, a small old sun spread withered light, parsimonious heat, across the planet's dissolute topography.

  "Thus it ends," murmured the stranger. She added, a little self-consciously, "What pathetic monuments to mankind's Senility!"

  As if for reassurance, she pressed a gloved hand to the surface of her time machine, which was unadorned and boxlike, smooth and spare, according to the fashions of her own age. Lifting apparently of its own volition, a lid at the top opened and a little freckled head emerged. With a frown she gestured her companion back, but then, changing her mind, she helped the child, which was clad in a small suit and helmet matching her own, from the hatch.

  "Witness this shabby finale, my son. Could I begrudge it you?"

  Guilelessly the child said, "It is awfully pretty, mama."

  It was not her way to contradict a child's judgement. She shrugged. "I am fulfilled, I suppose, and unsurprised, though I had hoped, well, for Hope." From the confusion of her private feelings she fled back to practicality. "Your father will be anxious. If we return now we can at least report to the committee tonight. And report success!" A proud glove fell upon her son's shoulder. "We have travelled the limit of the machine's capacity! Here, Time has ceased to exist. The instruments say so, and their accuracy is unquestionable." Her eye was caught by a shift of colour as the outline of one building appeared to merge with another, separate, and re-form. "I had imagined it bleaker, true."

  The city coughed, like a giant in slumber, and was silent for a while.

  The boy made to remove his helmet. She stopped him. "The atmosphere! Noxious, Snuffles, without doubt. One breath could kill."

  It seemed for a moment that he would argue with her opinion. Eye met grey-blue eye; jaws set; he sighed, lowering his head and offering the side of the machine a petulant kick. From the festering city, a chuckle, causing the boy to whirl, defensive and astonished. A self-deprecating grin, the lips gleaming at the touch of the dampening tongue; a small gauntlet reaching for the large one. An indrawn breath.

  "You are probably correct, mama, in your assessment."

  She helped him back into their vessel, glanced once, broodingly, at the shimmering city, at the pulsing lake, then followed her son through the hatch until she stood again at her controls in the machine's green-lit and dim interior.

  As she worked the dials and levers, she was studied by her son. Her curly brown hair was cut short at the nape, her up-curving lips gave an impression of amiability denied by the sobriety and intensity of her large, almond-shaped brown eyes. Her hands were small, well-formed, and, to a person from the 20th century, her body would have seemed slight, in proportion with those hands (though she was thought tall and shapely by her own folk). Moving efficiently, but with little instinctive feel for her many instruments, considering each action rapidly and intelligently and carrying it through in the manner of one who has learned a lesson thoroughly but unenthusiastically, she adjusted settings and figures. Her son seated himself in his padded chair, tucked beneath the main console at which his mother stood, and used his own small computer to make the simpler calculations required by her for the re-programming of the machine so that it could return to the exact place and almost the exact time of its departure.

  When she had finished, she withdrew a pace or two from the controls, appraised them and was satisfied. "We are ready, Snuffles, to begin the journey home. Strap in, please."

  He was already safely buckled. She crossed to the chair facing him, arranged her own harness, spread gloved fingers across the seven buttons set into the arm of the chair, and pressed four of them in sequence. The green light danced across her visor and through it to her face as she smiled encouragement to her son. She betrayed no nervousness; her body and her features were mastered absolutely. It was left to her child to display some anxiety, the upper teeth caressing the lower lip, the eyes darting from mother to those dials visible to him, one hand tugging a trifle at a section of the webbing holding his body to the chair. The machine quivered and, barely audible, it hissed. The sound was unfamiliar. The boy's brows drew closer together. The green light became a faint pink. The machine signalled its perplexity. It had not moved a moment or a centimetre. There was no reason for this; all functions were in perfect operation.

  Permitting herself no sign of a reaction, she re-set the buttons. The green light returned. She repeated the preliminary code, whereupon the light grew a deeper pink and two blue lamps began to blink. She returned all functions to standby, pulled the harness from her body, rose to her feet and began to make her calculations from the beginning. Her original accuracy was confirmed. She went back to her seat, fastened her webbing, pressed the four buttons in sequence. And for the third time the machine stated its inability to carry out the basic return procedure.

  "Is the time machine broken, mama?"

  "Impossible."

  "Then someone is preventing us from leaving."

  "The least welcome but the likeliest suggestion. We were unwise not to bring protection."

  "The baboons do not travel well."

  "It is our misfortune. But we
had not expected any life at all at the End of Time." She fingered her ear. "We shall have to rule out metaphysical interference."

  "Of course." He had been brought up by the highest standards. There were some things which were not mentioned, nor, better yet, considered, by the polite society of his day. And Snuffles was an aristocrat of boys.

  She consulted the chronometer. "We shall remain inside the machine and make regular attempts to return at every hour out of twenty hours. If by then we have failed, we shall consider another plan."

  "You are not frightened, mama?"

  "Mystified, merely."

  Patiently, they settled down to let the first hour pass.

  2. An Exploratory Expedition

  Hand in hand and cautiously they set their feet upon a pathway neither liquid nor adamantine, but apparently of a dense, purple gas which yielded only slightly as they stepped along it, passing between forms which could have been the remains either of buildings or of beasts.

  "Oh, mama!" The eyes of the boy were bright with unusual excitement. "Shall we find monsters?"

  "I doubt if it is life, in any true sense, that we witness here, Snuffles. There is only a moral. A lesson for you — and for myself."

  Streamers of pale red wound themselves around the whispering towers, like pennants about their poles. Gasping, he pointed, but she refused the sight more than a brief glance. "Sensation, only," she said. "The appeal to the infantile imagination is obvious — the part of every adult that should properly be suppressed and which should not be encouraged too much in children."

  Blue winds blew and the buildings bent before them, crouching and changing shape, grumbling as they passed. Clusters of fragments, bloody marble, yellow-veined granite, lilac-coloured slate, frosted limestone, gathered like insects in the air; fires blazed and growled, and then where the pathway forked they saw human figures and stopped, watching.

  It was an arrangement of gallants, all extravagant cloaks and jutted scabbards. It stuck legs and elbows at brave angles so the world should know its excellence and its self-contained beauty, so that the collective bow, upon the passing of a lady's carriage, should be accomplished with a precision of effect, swords raised, like so many tails, behind, heads bent low enough for doffed plumes to trail, and be soiled, upon the pavings.

  Calling, she approached the group, but it had vanished, background, carriages and all, before she had taken three paces, to be replaced by exotic palms which forever linked and twisted their leaves and leaned one towards the other, as if in a love dance. She hesitated, thinking that she saw beyond the trees a plaza where stood a familiar old man, her father, but it was a statue, and then it was a pillar, then a fountain, and through the rainbow waters she saw three or four faces which she recognized, fellow children, known before her election to adult status, smiling at her, memories of an innocence she sometimes caught herself yearning for; a voice spoke, seemingly into her ear (she felt the breath, surely!): "The Armatuce shall be Renowned through you, Dafnish…" Turning, clutching her son's hand, she discovered only four stately birds walking on broad, careful feet into a shaft of light which absorbed them. Elsewhere, voices sang in strange, delicate languages, of sadness, love, joy and death. A cry of pain. The tinkling of bells and lightly brushed harp strings. A groan and deep-throated laughter.

  "Dreams," said the boy. "Like dreams, mama. It is so wonderful."

  "Treachery," she murmured. "We are misled." But she would not panic.

  Once or twice more, in the next few moments, buildings shaped themselves into well-known scenes from her recent past. In the shifting light and the gas it was as if all that had ever existed existed again for a brief while.

  She thought: "If Time has ceased to be, then Space, too, becomes extinct — is all this simply illusion — a memory of a world? Do we walk a void, in reality? We must consider that a likelihood."

  She said to Snuffles: "We had best return to our ship."

  A choir gave voice in the surrounding air, and the city swayed to the rhythm. A young man sang in a language she knew:

  Ten times thou saw'st the fleet fly by:

  The skies illum'd in shining jet

  And gold, and lapis lazuli .

  How clear above the engines' cry

  Thy voice of sweet bewilderment!

  (Remember, Nalorna, remember the Night) .

  Then, wistfully, the voice of an older woman:

  "Could I but know such ecstasy again ,

  When all those many heroes of the air

  Knel't down as one and call'd me fair ,

  Then I would judge Nalorna more than bless'd!

  Immortal Lords immortal, too, made me!

  (I am Nalorna, whom the flying godlings loved) ."

  And she paused to listen, against the nagging foreboding at the back of her brain, while an old man sang:

  " Ah, Nalorna, so many that are dead loved thee!

  Slain like winged game that falls beneath the hunter's shot .

  First they rose up, and then with limbs outspread, they drop' d:

  Through fiery Day they plung'd, their bodies bright;

  Stain'd bloody scarlet in the sun's sweet mourning light .

  (But Remember, Nalorna, remember only the Night) ."

  A little fainter, the young man's voice came again:

  Ten times, Nalorna, did the fleet sweep by!

  Ten hands saluted thee, ten mouths

  Ten garlands kiss't; ten silent sighs

  Sailed down to thee. And then, in pride ,

  Thou rais'd soft arms and pointed South .

  (Oh, Remember, Nalorna, only the Night) .

  Telling herself that her interest was analytical, she bent her head to hear more, but though the singing continued, very faintly, the language had changed and was no longer in a tongue she could comprehend.

  "Oh, mama!" Snuffles glanced about him, as if seeking the source of the singing. "They tell of a great air battle. Is it that which destroyed the folk of this city?"

  "… without which the third level is next to useless …" said an entirely different voice in a matter-of-fact tone.

  Rapidly, she shook her head, to clear it of the foolishness intimidating her habitual self-control. "I doubt it, Snuffles. If you would seek a conqueror, then Self-Indulgence is the villain who held those last inhabitants in sway. Every sight we see confirms that fact. Oh, and Queen Sentimentality ruled here, too. The song is her testament — there were doubtless thousands of similar examples — books, plays, tapes — entertainments of every sort. The city reeks of uncontrolled emotionalism. What used to be called Art."

  "But we have Art, mama, at home."

  "Purified — made functional. We have our machine-makers, our builders, our landscapers, our planners, our phrasemakers. Sophisticated and specific, our Art. This — all this — is coarse. Random fancies have been indulged, potential has been wasted…"

  "You do not find it in any way attractive?"

  "Of course not! My sensibility has long since been mastered. The intellects which left this city as their memorial were corrupt, diseased. Death is implicit in every image you see. As a festering wound will sometimes grow fluorescent, foreshadowing the end, so this city shines. I cannot find putrescence pleasing. By its existence this place denies the point of every effort, every self-sacrifice, every martyrdom of the noble Armatuce in the thousand years of its existence!"

  "It is wrong of me, therefore, to like it, eh, mama?"

  "Such things attract the immature mind. Children once made up the only audience a senile old man could expect for his silly ravings, so I've heard. The parallel is obvious, but your response is forgivable. The child who would attain adult status among the Armatuce must learn to cultivate the mature view, however. In all you see today, my son, you will discover a multitude of examples of the aberrations which led mankind so close, so many times, to destruction."

  "They were evil, then, those people?"

  "Unquestionably. Self-Indulgence is the enemy of Self-I
nterest. Do not the School Slogans say so?"

  "And 'Sentimentality Threatens Survival'," quoted the pious lad, who could recall perfectly every one of the Thousand Standard Maxims and several score of the Six Hundred Essential Slogans for Existence (which every child should know before he could even consider becoming an adult).

  "Exactly." Her pride in her son helped dispel her qualms, which had been increasing as a herd of monstrous stone reptiles lumbered past in single file while the city chanted, in what was evidently a version of her own tongue, something which seemed to be an involved scientific formula in verse form. But she shivered at the city's next remark:

  "… and Dissipation is Desecration and Dishonours All. Self-denial is a Seed which grows in the Sunlight of Purified something or other … Oh, well — I'll remember — I'll remember — just give me time — time … It is not much that a man can save On the sands of life, in the straits of time, Who swims in sight of the great third wave that never a swimmer shall cross or climb. Some waif washed up with the strays and spars That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars; Weed from the water, grass from a grave, A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme … Rapid cooling can produce an effect apparently identical in every respect, and this leads us to assume that, that, that … Ah, yes, He who dies serves, but he who serves shall live forever … I've got the rest somewhere. Available on Requisition Disc AAA4. Please use appropriate dialect when consulting this programme. Translations are available from most centres at reasonable swelgarter am floo-oo chardra werty …"

  "The Maxims, mother! The city quotes the Maxims!"

  "It mocks them, you mean! Come, we had best return to our craft."

  "Is the city mad, mama?"

  With an effort she reduced the rate of her heart beat and increased the width of her stride, his hand firmly held.