Читать онлайн «Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys»
Автор Мик Фаррен
Mick Farren
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTERTWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mick Farren
Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys
It was the central paradox of human behavior and, by direct correlation, all of human history. Each time humanity achieved a peak, it seemed that some pathological instinct moved it immediately to seek an abyss into which to hurl itself. Shortly after the human walked erect and organized himself into tribal groups, he hit upon the concept of warfare. Simultaneously with the discovery of fission energy, humanity began to contemplate nuclear planetary annihilation. The discovery of the Mahler drive took the species to the stars, but once it was there, it courted extinction by engaging in the disastrous Thousand Years War with the Draan Hives.
Thus it was, in the supposedly divine moment when human metaphysics freed the core psyche from the limitations of the corporeal organism, humans developed almost insurmountable problems regarding the exact nature of reality.
CHAPTER ONE
THE CAVERNS WERE ENTERING ONE OF THEIR REGULAR PHASESof melancholy, and the Minstrel Boy knew that it was time to move on. The halls and tunnels softly rang with mournful horns, and muffled drums echoed on the stairwells. It was as though the warmth had gone out of the basalt walls and been replaced by the first hint of a stiletto chill that would eventually pierce to the bone. The carvings that lined the walls had changed, too. Where once the frowns of the gargoyles had been sardonic, puzzled, or even amused, the stone eyes had begun to take on a hard, evil glint. In the Caverns such changes of mood followed a pattern that was as regular and predictable as the seasons. The soft, carefree summer of hedonism was cooling to an autumn of perverse cruelty.
That, in its turn, would degenerate into a winter of dark ritual, horror, and brutality. For those who survived, spring would come with exhaustion and the final, hollow-eyed knowledge that nothing remained that could be done and that there was nowhere farther to go. Those who went to the edge eventually had to return. It brought the inevitable regeneration that enabled the cycle to turn yet again. The Minstrel Boy was strictly a summer migrant. He had no desire to experience the soul winter of the Caverns.There were those who claimed that the changing moods of the Caverns were only a reflection of the emotional shifts of the Presence, the amorphous, nonhuman, and never-seen entity that was reputed to live in the bowels of the extinct volcano that also housed the Caverns. Very little was known about the Presence except that it was there — and that it subtly affected the behavior of those who lived within the margins of its environment. There was a theory that the Presence actually generated the stability of the entire volcanic structure, and its proponents pointed tothe fact that the Caverns had no visible stasis generators. There was an even more elaborate scenario in which the Presence derived some strange alien gratification from the agonies and ecstasies of its mortal neighbors and used its influence to ease them toward the greatest possible excesses.
