"George R. R. Martin - The Stone City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

The Stone City




THE STONE CITY
Martin, George R. R.

The crossworlds had a thousand names. Human starcharts listed it as Grayrest, when they listed it at all—
which was seldom, for it lay a decade's journey inward from the realms of men. The Dan'lai named it
Empty in their high, barking tongue. To the ul-mennaleith, who had known it longest, it was simply the
world of the stone city. The Kresh had a word for it, as did the Linkellar, and the Cedrans, and other
races had landed there and left again, so other names lingered on. But mostly it was the crossworlds to
the beings who paused there briefly while they jumped from star to star.

It was a barren place, a world of gray oceans and endless plains where the windstorms raged. But for the
spacefield and the stone city, it was empty and lifeless. The field was at least five thousand years old, as
men count time. The ul-nayileith had built it in the glory days when they claimed the ullish stars, and for
a hundred generations it had made the crossworlds theirs. But then the ul-nayileith had faded and the ul-
mennaleith had come to fill up their worlds, and now the elder race was remembered only in legends and
prayers.

Yet their spacefield endured, a great pockmark on the plains, circled by the towering windwalls that the
vanished engineers had built against the storms. Inside the high walls lay the port city—hangars and
barracks and shops where tired beings from a hundred worlds could rest and be refreshed. Outside, to the
west, nothing; the winds came from the west, battering against the walls with a fury soon drained and
used for power. But the eastern walls had a second city in their shadows, an open-air city of plastic
bubbles and metal shacks. There huddled the beaten and the outcast and the sick; there clustered the
shipless.

Beyond that, further east: the stone city.

It had been there when the ul-nayileith had come, five thousand years before. They had never learned
how long it stood against the winds, or why. The ullish elders were arrogant and curious in those days, it
was said, and they had searched. They walked the twisting alleys, climbed the narrow stairs, scaled the
close-set towers and the square-topped pyramids. They found the endless dark passageways that wove
mazelike beneath the earth. They discovered the vastness of the city, found all the dust and awesome
silence. But nowhere did they find the Builders.

Finally, strangely, a weariness had come upon the ul-nayileith, and with it a fear. They had withdrawn
from the stone city, never to walk its halls again. For thousands of years the stone was shunned, and the


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 The Stone City

worship of the Builders was begun. And so too had begun the long decline of the elder race.

But the ul-mennaleith worship only the ul-nayileith. And the Dan'lai worship nothing. And who knows
what humans worship? So now, again, there were sounds in the stone city; footfalls rode the alley winds.