"Vance, Jack - Alastor 2 - Trullion-2262" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

its iridescent surfaces, Lusz, the palace of the Connatic, is a wonderful sight and is often
reckoned the most inspiring artifact of the human race.
Chapter 1
* * *
Chamber 2262 along the Ring of the Worlds pertains to Trullion, the lone planet of a small white
star, one spark in a spray curling out toward the cluster's edge. Trullion is a small world, for

the most part water, with a single narrow continent, Merlank,* at the equator. Great banks of
cumulus drift in from the sea and break against the central mountains; hundreds of rivers return
down broad valleys where fruit and cereals grow so plentifully as to command no value.
The original settlers upon Trullion brought with them those habits of thrift and zeal which had
promoted survival in a previously harsh environment; the first era of Trill history produced a
dozen wars, a thousand fortunes, a caste of hereditary aristocrats, and a waning of the initial
dynamism. The Trill commonalty asked itself: Why toil, why carry weapons when a life of feasts,
singing, revelry and ease is an equal option? In the space of three generations old Trullion
became a memory. The ordinary Trill now worked as circumstances directed: to prepare for a feast,
to indulge his taste for hussade, to earn a pulsor for his boat or a pot for his kitchen or a
length of cloth for his paray, that easy shirtlike garment worn by man and woman alike.
Occasionally he tilled his lush acres, fished the ocean, netted the river, harvested wild fruit,
and when the mood was on him, dug emeralds and opals from the mountain slopes, or gathered couch.
**He worked perhaps an hour each day, or occasionally as much as two or three; he spent
considerably more time musing on the verandah of his ramshackle house. He distrusted most
technical devices, finding them unsympathetic, confusing and-more important-expensive, though he
gingerly used a telephone the better to order his social activities, and took the pulsor of his
boat for granted.
* Merlank: a variety of lizard. The continent clasps the equator like a lizard clinging to a blue
glass orb.
** cauch: an aphrodisiac drug derived from the spore of a mountain mold and used by Trills to a
greater or lesser extent. Some retreated so far into erotic fantasy as to become irresponsible,
and thus the subject of mild ridicule. Irresponsibility, in the context of the Trill environment,
could hardly be accounted a critical social problem.
As in most bucolic societies, the Trill knew his precise place in the hierarchy of classes. At
the summit, almost a race apart, was the aristocracy; at the bottom were the nomad Trevany, a
group equally distinct. The Trill disdained unfamiliar or exotic ideas. Ordinarily calm and
gentle, he nonetheless, under sufficient provocation, demonstrated ferocious rages, and certain of
his customs-particularly the macabre ritual at the prutanshyy-were almost barbaric.
The government of Trallion was rudimentary and a matter in which the average Trill took little
interest. Merlank was divided into twenty prefectures, each administered by a few bureaus and a
small group of officials, who constituted a caste superior to the ordinary Trill but considerably
inferior to the aristocrats. Trade with the rest of the cluster was unimportant; on all Trill only
four space-ports existed; Port Gaw in the west of Merlank, Port Kerubian on the north coast, Port
Maheul on the south coast, and Vayamenda in the east.
A hundred miles east of Port Maheul was the market town Welgen, famous for its fine hussade
stadium. Beyond Welgen lay the Fens, a district of remarkable beauty. Thousands of waterways
divided this area into a myriad islands, some tracts of good dimension, some so small as to
support only a fisherman's cabin and a tree for the mooring of his boat.
Everywhere entrancing vistas merged one into another. Gray-green menas, silver-russet pomanders,
black jerdine stood in stately rows along the waterways, giving each island its distinctive
silhouette. Out upon their dilapidated verandahs sat the country folk, with jugs of homemade wine
at hand. Sometimes they played music, using concertinas, small round-bellied guitars, mouthcalliopes