"Mike Resnick - Eros Descending" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

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Copyright ©1985 by Mike Resnick
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Prologue
TheVelvet Comet spun slowly in space, resembling nothing more than a giant barbell.

Its metal skin glistened a brilliant silver, and its array of flashing lights could be seen from literally tens of
thousands of miles away.

Seventeen different engineering firms had worked on its design, thousands of men and machines had
spent millions of hours on its construction, and it housed a permanent staff of more than six hundred men
and women. Owned and financed by the Vainmill Syndicate, the largest of the Republic's conglomerates,
it had been built in orbit around the distant planet of Charlemagne, but now it circled Deluros VIII, the
huge world that would someday become the capital planet of the race of Man.

During its eighty-seven years of existence it had become a byword for opulence and elegance, a synonym
for hedonism and dissipation. Its fame had spread to the most remote worlds of the Republic, and while
its sybaritic luxuries and even its air of exclusivity were often imitated, they were never equaled.

TheVelvet Comet , after more than three decades of gestation, had been born in space, and less than a
century after its birth it would die in space, mourned by few and forgotten by most. But in the meantime,
it did its living with a grace and style that would not be seen again for many millennia.

It was the crown jewel in the Syndicate's Entertainment and Leisure Division, a showplace where the rich
and the famous—and occasionally the notorious—gathered to see and be seen, to conspicuously
consume, and to revel in pleasures which were designed to satisfy even the most jaded of tastes. For
while theVelvet Comet housed a compendium of the finest shops and boutiques, of gourmet restaurants
and elegant lounges, while it boasted a fabulous casino and a score of other entertainments, it was first
and foremost a brothel.

And it was the brothel, and the promises of secret delights that it proffered, that enticed its select clientele
out to theComet . They came from Deluros VIII and a thousand nearby and distant worlds. Money was
no object to these men and women; they came to play, and to relax, and to indulge.

All except one of them, who came with one purpose in mind, and left with another.

Chapter 1
The tall, elegantly clad, blonde woman reached out a jeweled hand and rubbed Secretariat's foreface, as
the muscular chestnut colt pawed nervously at the bedding of his makeshift stall. His groom, leaning
against one of the storage area's walls, kept a watchful eye on the sleek red colt.

“He's lovely,” said the Steel Butterfly.

“He's about as pretty a horse as I've ever had in my charge,” agreed the groom.