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

The hulking mass of Archon steel and black stone dominated an over-hanging
cliff about six miles north of this plateau upon which the humans were housed.
Through binoculars, I could see the tall slits of tower windows glowing yellow while
pale white searchlights stabbed out from the keep and up to the highlands, then
probed down over the human escarpment and across the Muse, then swept out to
the sulfur sea. None of us from the troupe had ever been to the keep, of
course—why would humans, other than dragomen (whom most of us do not
consider human), have any busi-ness with Archons? They own us, they control our
lives, they dictate our actions and fates, but they have no interest in us and we
usually return the favor.

****

There were twenty-three of us in this Shakespearean troupe called the Earth’s Men.
Not all of us were men, of course, although we knew through stage history that in the
Bard’s day even the women’s roles were acted by males.

My name is Wilbr. I was twenty SEY old that day we landed on 25- 25-261B
and had been chosen for the troupe when I was nine and turned out to be good
enough at memorizing my lines and hitting my marks to be on stage for most
productions, but by age twenty I knew in my heart that I would never be a great
actor. Probably not even a good one. But my hope remained to play Hamlet
someday, somehow, somewhere. Even if only once.

There were a couple of others about my age in the Earth’s Men; Philp was
one of them and a good friend. There were several young women in the troupe,
including Aglaé, the best and most attractive Juliet and Rosalind I’ve ever seen: she
was a year older than me and my choice for girlfriend, lover, and wife, but she never
noticed me; Tooley was our age, but he primarily did basic maintenance engineering
on the Muse, although he could hold a spear in a crowd scene if pressed to.

Kemp and Burbank were the two real leaders of the troupe, along with
Kemp’s wife (and Burbank’s lover) Condella, whom everyone secretly, and never
affectionately, referred to as “the Cunt.” I never learned how the nick-name got
started—some say it was her French accent as Catherine talking to her maid in
Henry V—but other and less kind guesses would probably have been equally
accurate.

Kemp had always been a clown in the most honorable sense of the word: a
young arbeiter comic actor and improviser when he was chosen for the Earth’s Men
by Burbank’s father, the former leader of the troupe, more than fifty years earlier.
One of Kemp’s specialties was Falstaff although he’d lost weight as he aged, so he
now had to wear a special suit fitted out with padding whenever he played Sir John.
He was a brilliant Falstaff, but he was even more brilliant—frighteningly so—as Lear.
If Kemp had had his way, we would have performed The Tragedy of King Lear for
every second performance.

Burbank had the weight for Falstaff but not the comic timing, and since he
was in his early fifties SEY, was not quite old enough—nor impressive enough in
personality—to make an adequate Lear. Yet he was now too old to play Hamlet, the