"S. M. Stirling - Sea of Time 03 - On the Oceans of Eternity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

Dr. Justin Clemens—Captain, Republic of Nantucket Coast
Guard (Medical Corps)—sipped at the thick sweet wine, mouth
dry. It was never easy to tell someone about the Event. Much else
about the Twentieth had faded, but that memory of terror
remained far too fresh. He'd been a teenager then…

His fiancee picked a date from the bowl on the low table that
stood between her and the Islander medic. He went on:

"… and then the glowing dome of light was gone, and our
whole island of Nantucket was… here. Back in this age. More
than three thousand years before our own time."

The platform beneath them was the terraced rooftop of a
section of The House That Was The Marvel of Mankind, The
Center of the Land, The Shining Residence, The Dwelling of
Majesty—in short, the palace of King Kashtiliash son of
Shagarakti-Shuriash. It sprawled around them as a city within
the greater city of Babylon; crenellated outer walls where sentries
paced with the late-summer sun bright on their steel and bronze,
whitewashed adobe and colored brick and tile, courtyards,
gardens, audience halls, workshops, storerooms, hareem,
barracks, shrines, and archives, faint sounds of chanting, talk,
feet, wheels, hooves, a whiff of cooking and a stale draft of
canal-water…

The two doctors sat on cushions beneath an awning, amid
potted plants and flowers and dwarf trees brought from all over
these lands.

Justin watched the woman as she frowned and thought,
noticing again how her face turned beautiful with the mind
within, despite thinness, big hooked nose, receding chin, and
incipient mustache. The huge dark eyes had depths to them. It
made him painfully aware of his own round-faced
near-plumpness, kept under control only by the necessities of
campaigning and twelve-hour workdays.

Here's hoping she gets it, went through him. So many just
can't grasp the concept. Plain bewildered, or lost in
superstitious terror. But Azzu-ena was extremely bright, and
practical, to boot. Her doctor-father had had no sons, and
brought his daughter up to his trade, which was unusual but not
completely outlandish in Babylon. These archaic-Semitic peoples
weren't what you'd call feminists by a long shot, but they weren't
as pathological about it as many of their descendants would…
would have, in the original history… become.

Well, there's the Assyrians, he reminded himself. They shut
women up in purdah like Afghans in the twentieth. But they're