"Halo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maddox Tom)

the temples and pagodas as the sun rose and turned the morning

mist into a huge veil of luminous pink, with the towers sticking

up like fairy castles. Everywhere around Pagan were the temples,

thousands of them, young and flourishing when William the

Conqueror was king. Now, quick-fab structures housing government

agencies nested among thousand year old pagodas, some in near

perfect condition, like Thatbyinnu Temple, myriad others no more

than ruins and forgotten names. You gained merit by building

pagodas, not by keeping up those built by someone long dead.

 

Like some other Southeast Asian countries, Myanmar still was

trying to recover from late-twentieth century politics; in

Myanmar's case, its decades-long bout with round-robin military

dictatorships and the chaos that came in their wake. And as was

so often the case in politically wobbly countries, it still

restricted access to the worldnet; through various kinds of

governments, its leaders had found the prospect of free

information flow unacceptable. Ka-band antennas were expensive,

their use licensed by permits almost impossible to get. As a

result, Gonzales and the memex had been like meat eaters stranded

among vegetarians, unable to get their nourishment.

 

He'd taken down the memex that morning. Its functions

dormant, it lay nestled inside one of his two fiber and aluminum

shock-cases, ready for transport. The other case held memory boxes