"Walter Jon Williams - Aristoi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

The words taken from Chinese are transcribed in Pin-yin, not Wade-Giles, and are therefore
pronounced more or less as the English-speaking reader finds them, with only two exceptions: the
ZK in "Zhenling" is pronounces like the j in "justice," and the word qi is pronounced "chee."

As a final note, I should point out that Aristos and Aristoi have their accent on the first
syllable.

Chapter 1

ANIMAL TAMER: Walk in, walk in to my menagerie Full of life and cruelty.

At Graduation, every five or seven or ten years, the Aris-toi celebrated in Persepolis. For the
most part they celebrated themselves.

Persepolis, in the Realized World, was an interesting artifact. It shaded by degrees into
"Persepolis," the real place becoming, through its illusory/electronic deeps and towers, an ever-
flexible, ever-unfolding megadimensional dream.


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Persepolis, the place, had been reconstructed on its original Persian floor plan, and sat on its
reconstructed plain at the meeting of the reconstructed Pulvar and Kor, where it took its place as
the (largely symbolic) capital of a reconstructed Earth2. The city was inhabited only a few days a
year, when Pan Wengong, the most senior of the Aristoi, convened the Terran Sessions. Behind the
City of a Hundred Columns loomed Kuh-e-Rahmat, the Mount of Mercy, its grey flanks a contrast to
the bright gold, vermilion, ivory, and turquoise that accentuated the city. To the hewn tombs of
Achaemenid

10

WALTER JON WILLIAMS

AR1STOI

11

kings carved into the side of the mountain were added those of many Aristoi, laid to rest in their
capital beside the descendants of Kurush the Great, whose tenuous spirits were presumed to be
flattered by the comparison. Atop the mountain itself, surrounded by a grove of cypress, was the
gold monument to the lost Captain Yuan, a place of homage and worship.

"Persepolis," the dream, was a far more interesting place. Most of the people who came here did
not do so in the flesh but through the oneirochronon, and the two palaces superimposed on one
another in ways both intricate and obscure. Earthz's archons and senators strolled along the
corridors, holding conversations with people others could not see. Corridors that dead-ended in
reality possessed doors and branches in the oneirochronic world. Some led to palaces, dominions,
grottos, and fantasies that did not exist on Earth2, or indeed anywhere, but were instead the