"Alexei Panshin - Sons of Prometheus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

Earth, and were then flatly abandoned with little more to keep them alive. Within fifteen years of the
founding of the first colony Earth was destroyed. Earth's heirs were one hundred twelve colonies—the
best of them barely at the subsistence level, and seven great ships whose crews were left in very
comfortable circumstances. The inequity was felt by all the Colonies and by some of those aboard the
Ships, but the only obvious reparation would have been on the order of giving each of long-dead India's
billions a chip of a brick from the Taj Mahal. So Tansman was a chromoplastician in a world ignorant of
chromoplasts, an incognito prince amongst sharp-toothed paupers, an uneasy rider in a coach that was
now, at last, coming to a stop in a dusty street and under a lowering sky.
He descended from the coach, bag in hand, a tall young man wearing the slouch hat, jacket, breeches
and leggings that were seasonable and stylish here. Tansman felt like a great fool. He'd never worn a hat
before in his life and he kept reaching up to adjust the clumsy uncomfortable thing. He was a thin man
with a thin face and a nose somewhat overlarge that he had never had altered because he had never been
one to do what everybody did; also a girl he had once had a tendre for had told him that it made him
look engaging, which, in fact, it did.
Close at hand was a flat-bed wagon with a gnarled little old man standing in the street beside it. He
was wearing a leather costume that might well be seasonable, but which Tansman was sure could never
have been considered stylish, and was holding a rag to his face. Tansman could sense a good reason for
this: there was in the air the most unpleasant odor he had ever smelled in his life, a very penetrating smell
of singed animal. The coach had stopped at the entrance to a square, the obvious center of this little
town.
Perhaps fifty yards distant across the square was built a great bonfire. By the fire were four men and
a cart drawn by a horse made visibly nervous by the heat and smell, so nervous that one of the men was
hard put to keep the horse still. Two of the men, working as a team grabbing arms and feet and heaving,
were adding the human bodies piled on the cart to those already roasting on the fire. The bodies were
naked and even at this distance Tansman could see that they were disfigured with purple blotches that
greatly resembled bruises, or port wine scars. These three men were wearing gloves and white cloth
masks. The speed and determination with which the pair worked showed only too clearly their anxiety to
be done and away. They treated the bodies like so many logs to be added to the fire. Besides the
impersonality there was a distinct note of fear and distaste. Tansman didn't share the fear since he had
been quite adequately protected against the spectrum of Zebulonite diseases, including this hemorrhagic
fever, before he left the Ship, but he could quite understand the distaste. He would have found it perhaps
more than he could do to stand beside a great open fire and stoke it with human cadavers. The fourth
man by the fire, however, seemed calm and unbothered. He was a white-robed, white-cowled,
black-belted friar standing so close to the fire that the hand of one young woman, who was heaved too
hastily, slapped the dirt at his feet. Apparently unmindful of heat, stench, infection or esthetics, he
continued speaking, trying to add one single note of dignity to the unpleasant deaths and necessarily hasty
disposal of these heirs of Earth.
Tansman was barely out of the coach before the driver had made a sharp whistle and the horses had
lurched forward. He might have to make a change of horses and this might be his ordinary stop, but
apparently he had no interest in following conventional practice. Perhaps, for all the talk of plague, he
hadn't bargained on a funeral pyre in the main square. Raising dust, the coach rattled to the right and
around the corner, and was gone between the mud-walled buildings. The wind under the gray sky was
chill and carried the dust raised by the coach.
The old man in leather was the only person on the street, the only person in view besides those by the
fire. He had a gold-spot earring set in his right ear, and a wicked-looking knife at his belt. He had curly
muttonchop whiskers and they, like the rest of his dirty brown hair, were shot with gray. The rest of his
face looked as though it had been shaved last about four days earlier. Altogether, he had something of a
bright-eyed monkey look about him.
"Mr. Tansman?" he said, taking the rag away. He had a nervous, strained look about him.
 Tansman said, "Yes."