"Mike Resnick - Velvet Comet 2 - Eros At Zenith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Cover art by Kevin E. Johnson

All rights reserved. For information address New American Library.

A hardcover edition of Eros at Zenith was published by Phantasia Press.

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First Signet Printing, July, 1985

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA



PROLOGUE.

The Velvet 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 forty-six 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 equalled.

The Velvet 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 the Velvet Comet housed a