"Ringo, John - Council Wars 2 - Emerald Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

from the bottom of the ocean to the photosphere of the sun. Failure of food
delivery, or being left on a mountaintop, or far out at sea, had doomed others
more slowly.
Thus had begun the Fall, and the Dying Time that followed it, when more than ten
percent of the population of the world, some one hundred million human beings in
their various forms, had died. Some, mercifully, before they knew what was
happening. Others to falls or drowning or slow deaths from starvation and
exposure.
And the lives of those left after the Dying Time were anything but easy. The
world had descended to a preindustrial environment with farmers scratching a
toe-hold in the land, and armies fighting a thousand small battles with bandit
gangs to hold the line and maintain some semblance of civilization.
The most important single group who saved the remnant population of earth was
made up of small groups of "reenactors," people who had wrapped their lives
around earlier times. There were small communities where people lived the lives
of their forefathers, using hand tools and domestic animals to replicate the
lives of the ancients.
Many of these people had been living their hobby for decades, or even centuries,
and knew techniques that no single person from any period in history would know.
They had used every trick, every technique, to save the lives of the refugees,
an old word that had been forgotten prior to the Fall, who arrived at their
doorstep.
In the area that had fallen to Sheida's purview, the areas of the former North
American Union, the reenactor societies had gathered the refugees, taught them
how to survive, and in extraordinary cases even thrive, and slowly rebuilt
society and government. Not so slowly, even. In no more than a year there was a
core government, a constitution and a burgeoning ground and naval force.
The latter two were vital because in Ropasa Paul had been doing the same thing.
But he was taking a different tack, establishing himself as dictator and using
the power in the bodies of people to Change them into a form "more suitable for
the current conditions." His Changed legions, growing in size every time they
took another section of Ropasa, had quickly overrun the entire area and
established an iron-fisted rule. And then he had begun his plan to invade the
Norau heartland of his enemy.
Sheida often wondered if she had been right to oppose Paul. On the face his plan
was not nearly as horrible as what had actually occurred. And he was getting
most of what he wanted from the war, anyway. Populations were booming since the
release of energy and most protocols had caused women to become fertile again.
People were certainly learning how to work.
But all she had to do was look at what had happened in Ropasa. Over the
centuries the strictures against using Mother as a universal eye, a universal
tool of coercion, had grown strong. Mother knowing your innermost secrets was
one thing; a person could handle that if they were sure no human was watching.
But everyone had secrets they didn't want the world to know. Everyone had the
occasional minor moral slip. Under the protocols pre-Fall, Mother could not be
used for criminal surveillance, period. For the small, volunteer and chronically
overworked police to track a criminal, to prevent a crime, to read a person's
mind, meant using other methods, other systems, rather than the All-Seeing
Mother.
If Paul had taken full control of the system, Mother would change from a