"L. E. Modesitt - Adiamante" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

<<< II


I sat at the circular cedar table I had made nearly a half-century earlier and
stared out across the piсons, looking beyond the mist at everything--and
nothing, as I had for a string of uncounted mornings.

The age-polished timbers still lifted the steep-pitched ceiling above me, and
the wide windows still admitted the light, and the white, hand-plastered walls
held still held that light.

I sniffed, catching the faintest of familiar scents, and I swallowed and
looked back at the piсon-covered hills to the northwest.

Morgen was dead, and there wasn't much more to be said. Nothing changed
that--not all the linkages we had shared or the ability to block her pain, to
enjoy the last days as she had grown weaker. Nor had all the rationalizing
helped, not about how much longer she had lived than could have any draff or
cyb--not that Earth had any cybs left since The Flight.

She was dead. A half-century together had not been enough. Her soulsongs were
not enough. If only athanasia were possible, athanasia of the body and not
just of songs so painful they ripped through me, so beautiful that I still
listened--and wept within myself, if only. . . .

Yet I did not wish to follow her--and I did not want to remain, either. So I
watched the piсons, my thoughts floating out with the greedy jays, the spunky
junkos, and the perpetually frightened jackrabbits. Beyond those more
traditional auras loomed the darkness of the vorpals and kalirams and the
protective emptiness of the sambur.

In that limbo, because I could not or would not decide, I answered the inlink
when it chimed in my skull.

"Ecktor."

"Crucelle. The cybs are back. I thought you might like the charge." Crucelle's
thoughts were clear, with the practice of centuries, along with the pulsed
information on the cyb fleet, the dozen shielded ships that glittered power in
the underweb and overspace and the multi-form transmissions that they had
beamed at each locial point on Earth. Behind the information was the slender
red-headed presence of Crucelle himself, a formal red-bronze dagger of a soul,
and behind Crucelle was the ever-hovering soul-shadow of Arielle, swirling
stormangel on his linknet.

"Me?"

"Someone has to be Coordinator." The thought words reflected the tempered and
honed edge of a formal blade: seldom used, but always ready.