"Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

that if nightways had not existed, she would have created it.
It has been one hundred and thirty-seven years since Shelomin Serendip abolished the Regency of
United Earth. Today Earth has no domestic government; no courts and no judges and no police. What it
does have is United Earth Intelligence and its College, and both institutions are only tools of the Face of
Night.
All of these figures--the mere thousands of years that human civilization itself has existed--are only
small fractions of the near 65 millennia that have passed since the Zaradin ended the Time Wars, and
disappeared; and the Continuing Time began.
The Continuing Time itself is young; the Time Wars raged for three and a half billion years; and there
are events in history earlier than that.

BOOK ONE:
THE MAN-SPACETHING WAR
2676-2681 Asimov

Summer 26, 2676 Asimov.
His heart beat like a drum.
He had attuned himself to the place, to the deliberate rhythm of the wilderness. Walking alone beneath
the blue sky of alien Earth, through a forest vaster than any on November, Tyrel November had emptied
his mind of analytical thought, and moved through the wilderness as one who belonged.
By dawn on his third day away from the College Tyrel knew himself followed.
It shook him out of his reverie, and he resented it near as much for that as for the danger it posed. He
camped that night without a fire, in that part of the Great North Forest called Washington, not far south
of Canada. He got himself high up in a spruce pine, gentled his breathing and his heart, cooled the surface
of his skin to the ambient for the surrounding air, and waited for morning.
High summer, and a gentle wind that held scents whose names he did not know. On the first day of
his trek he had seen a brown bear, but he had been upwind of it. He could pick out a few scents, here
and there beneath the sharp overlay of the pine; deer and running water strong among them.
Humans could be found not two hundred and sixty klicks to the west, if Tyrel felt the need to go to
them, clustered in small cities along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. With Earth's population down below
four billion, people were perhaps rarer than they had once been--but by the standards of a man from
November, a world where a quarter of Earth's population had spread itself across three times Earth's
land surface, they were plentiful enough.
He did not feel the need to seek out human company. His follower, perhaps a night face, knew little
woodcraft. It was a rare art on Earth; and if the forest through which Tyrel traveled was not the same
forest in which he had been raised, well, it was not very different. Wilderness has its own reason, and the
wilderness of November is, with rare notable exceptions, largely that of Earth, transplanted four hundred
light years.
He knew himself followed, and it was enough.

In the last tenth of light, from his tree Tyrel had picked out the highest spot around, a bluff overlooking
the river; in the last tenth of darkness he came down from the tree. He left both his knives, his backpack
and his clothes, at the base of the tree, and covered them with brush and leaves. There was too much
metal in the knives and backpack, and his skin was better camouflage than the brown hiking clothes. He
doubted that his follower was using deep radar; on many worlds it might have gotten away with it, but not
on Earth itself. The Citadel of the Regency is located in North America; anyone polluting the
electromagnetic spectrum with military caliber radar would have the Face of Night to deal with, and
promptly. But unlikely was not impossible, and Tyrel did not take unnecessary chances where his life was
concerned.
 He kept the rifle. Its polymer stock and monocrystal barrel were unlikely to show up even on deep