"George R. R. Martin - Loaves and Fishes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

worlds than he could easily remember, but he would be unlikely to forget S’uthlam any time soon.
He had seen a goodly number of breathtaking sights: the crystal towers of Avalon, the skywebs of
Arachne, the churning seas of Old Poseidon and the black basalt mountains of Clegg. The city that was
S’uthlam—the old names were only districts and neighborhoods now, the ancient cities having grown into
one swollen megalopolis centuries ago—rivaled any of them.
Tuf had a certain fondness for tall buildings, and he gazed out upon the cityscape by both day and
night—on observation platforms at one kilometer, two, five, nine. No matter how high he ascended, the
lights went on and on, sprawling across the land endlessly in all directions, with nowhere a break to be
seen. Square and featureless forty- and fifty-story buildings stood cheek-to-jowl in endless rows,
crowding each other, living in the perpetual shadow of mirrored towers that rose around them to drink
the sun. Levels were built upon other levels that had been built upon still others. The moving sidewalks
crossed and crisscrossed in patterns of labrynthine intricacy. Beneath the surface ran a network of vast
subterranean roads where tubetrains and delivery capsules hurtled through the darkness at hundreds of
kays per hour, and beneath the roads were basements and sub-basements and tunnels and underways
and malls and sub-housing, a whole second city that burrowed as far below the ground as its mirrored
sibling ascended above it.
Tuf had seen the lights of the metropolis from the Ark; from orbit, the city swallowed half a continent.
From the surface, it seemed large enough to swallow galaxies. There were other continents; they, too,
blazed by night with the lights of civilization. The sea of light had no islands of darkness within it; the
S’uthlamese had no room to spare for luxuries like parks. Tuf did not disapprove; he had always thought
parks to be a perverse institution, designed principally to remind civilized humanity how raw and crude
and uncomfortable life had been when they had been forced to live it in nature.
Haviland Tuf had sampled a great variety of cultures in his wanderings, and he judged the culture of the
S’uthlamese to be inferior to none. It was a world of variety, of dizzying possibilities, of a richness that
partook both of vitality and decadence. It was a cosmopolitan world, plugged into the network that
linked the stars, freely plundering the music, drama, and sensoria imported from other worlds, and using
those unceasing stimuli to endlessly transform and mutate its own cultural matrix. The city offered more
modes of recreation and more entertainment of more varied sorts than Tuf had ever seen in any one place
before—sufficient choices to occupy a tourist for several standard years, if one desired to taste it all.
During his years of travel, Haviland Tuf had seen the advanced science and technological wizardry of
Avalon and Newholme, Tober-in-the-Veil, Old Poseidon, Baldur, Arachne, and a dozen other worlds
out on the sharpened leading edge of human progress. The technology demonstrated on S’uthlam was
equal to the most advanced of them. The orbital elevator itself was an impressive feat—Old Earth was
supposed to have built such constructs in the ancient days before the Collapse, and Newholme had
raised one once, only to have it fall during the war, but nowhere else had Tuf ever observed such a
colossal artifact, not even on Avalon itself, where such elevators had been studied and rejected on the
grounds of economy. And the slidewalks, the tubetrains, the manufactories, all were advanced, and
efficient. Even the government seemed to work.
S’uthlam was a wonder world.
Haviland Tuf observed it, traveled through it, and sampled its marvels for three days before he returned
to his small, cramped, premiere-class sleeping quarters on the seventy-ninth floor of a tower hotel, and
summoned the host. “I wish to make arrangements for an immediate return to my ship,” he said, seated
on the edge of the narrow bed he had summoned from a wall, the chairs being uncomfortably small. He
folded large white hands neatly atop his stomach.
The host, a tiny man barely half Tuf’s height, seemed nonplussed. “It was my understanding that you
were to stay for another ten days,” he said.
“That is correct,” said Tuf. “Nonetheless, it is the nature of plans to be changed. I wish to return to orbit
as soon as is conveniently possible. I would be most grateful if you would see to the arrangements, sir.”
“There’s so much you haven’t seen yet!”
“Indeed. Yet I find that what I have seen, however small a sample of the whole it may be, has been more