"Dan Simmons - Muse of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

I always love the way the Muse roars down through cloud and sky on her
thundering three-mile-long pillar of fire, especially at night, and the descent to the
arbeiter community on the coastal plateau below the Archon keep of Mezel-Goull
was no disappointment.

We landed on the inner edge of the great stone shelf separating the human
villages from the acid-tossed sea cliffs. One glance at the Muse’s log had reminded
me that 25-25-261B had only three variations in its day and weather: twilight-bright
dimness and scalding spray blown in by winds from the crashing black ocean of
sulfuric acid for fourteen hours each day; twilight-bright dimness and sandstorms
blown to the barely habitable coasts by hot winds from the interior of the continent
for another fourteen hours each day; and full darkness when no winds blew for the
final four-teen hours. The air was breathable here—all of our tour worlds had that in
common, of course, since we only travel to planets where the Archons keep arbeiter
and dole slaves—but even in the middle of their twenty-one hours of daytime on this
bleak rock, the sky brightened to only a dim, brooding grayness because of the
constant layers of clouds, and no one ventured out unprotected during the hours
when the scalding spray blew in from the black, sulfuric sea.

The Muse touched down during the hours the hot simoom winds blew. No
one came out from the huddled stone city to meet us. The thousands of arbeiters
were either sleeping in their barracks between shifts or work-ing in the mines,
dropping down to darkness in rusty buckets and then following veins miles deeper
underground to harvest a gray fungus that the Archons considered a delicacy. The
few hundred local doles in their some-what higher huddle of stone hovels were doing
whatever doles do: record-ing, accounting, measuring, file-keeping, waiting for
instructions from their masters via the dragomen.

We stayed inside the ship while the hot winds roared, but the Muse’s cabiri
scrambled out through maintenance hatches like so many flesh-and-metal spiders,
opened storage panels, rigged worklights, strung long cables from the hull, pounded
k-chrome stakes into solid rock, unfolded steel-mesh canvas, and had the main
performance tent up and rigidified within thirty minutes. The first show was not
scheduled to begin for another six hours, but it took a while for the cabiri to arrange
the lighting and stage and set up the many rows of seats. The old Globe Theater in
London during the Bard’s time, according to troupe lore, would seat three thousand,
but our little tent-theater comfortably seated about eight hundred human beings. We
expected far fewer than that during each of our four scheduled perfor-mances on
25-25-261B.

On many worlds we have permission to land at a variety of arbeiter huddles,
but this world had only this single major human population center. The town has no
name, of course. We humans gave up naming things long ago, abandoning that habit
along with our culture, politics, arts, history, hope, and sense of self. No one in the
troupe or among the arbeiters and doles here had a clue as to who had named the
Archon keep Mezel-Goull, which apparently meant “Devil’s Rest,” but the name
seemed appropriate. It sounded appropriate, even if the words actually had no
meaning.