"Chalker, Jack L - G.o.d. Inc. 2 - The Shadow Dancers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

There wasn't no driver, neither; not even a driver's seat. This fellow
Aldrath-we found out quick that they said their first names last and last names
first, like the Orientals do-he just went up front, took some kind of card out
of a little pocket in his toga, and stuck it in a slot. The door closed, and off
we went, no seatbelts or nothin'. You had to look outside to see that we was
even movin'-and was we movin'! Up, up, and away real fast.
I could see the place below us clearly now, just a little round dome of a
building in the middle of a bunch of trees in the middle of a bunch of low
mountains kinda like the Poconos, but with no roads, no power lines, no nothin'.
It was a sunny day with just them cotton candy clouds, but we stayed just below
them, so you had a right good view of the country below for miles and miles.
Here and there you could see round towers and groups of domes and cubes and
other funny shapes, but none of the places were real big and there was no roads
at all.
Aldrath punched something in one of them compartments and brought out some
drinks. I kinda figured they was somethin' like that. He saw that Sam and me
were mostly lookin' out and down at the country, which didn't look the least bit
familiar but really didn't look all that strange, neither. Sorta like central
Pennsylvania or upstate New York, only before all them folks stuck all them
roads and wires through it. 'Course, if your cars and buses and trucks all fly
like this thing we was in, you don't need all that.
"If you are looking for major cities, we have them," Aldrath said, "but not in
this area. Our cities are mostly in the subtropical and tropical climates. When
you can control or eliminate all the pests and divert big storms and manipulate
the rainfall, those places are like gardens. This is mostly an area of
wilderness and balance, with a few towns for special purposes or simply because
people like to live here, and a number of broad estates mingled with forests and
game reserves."
"Id've thought sheer numbers would have populated a lot of this," Sam replied.
"Or is the population stable?"
"It's stable, but reasonably large. We keep it worldwide at about a billion,
which is more than adequate to preserve what should be preserved. It's not that
we're restrictive, but we have many outlets for a population, both in settling
and preserving certain other Earths that are truly wonderful places to live but
which never developed a higher race and also the planets and to a limited extent
the stars."
Even I was startled at that one. "You mean you don't just go next door, you're
also up there?"
He smiled. "Getting to the near planets is no great trick, nor is colonizing a
place like Mars. The stars are trickier, and we're still in our infancy
regarding them, but who is better qualified to go than we if there are in fact
alien civilizations out there? It provides us with a limitless and exciting
future, you see. The parallel worlds go from infinity to infinity, and each
universe is in itself so vast and varied it will end before anyone can explore
more than a fraction of it. That's the secret to keeping a civilization as
successful and prosperous as ours from rotting and decaying, you see. There is
always someplace new to go, something new to learn, something wonderful waiting
to be discovered. We have never become jaded or yielded to rot."
Yeah, it sure sounded like one of them-what'cha call it?-Utopias, all right, and
maybe it was about as close as we get, but I couldn't help think that we'd