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

It all had to be not simply real, but finer, more real, than reality itself. True reality was
often overlooked in its more exact details, and Gabriel did not want to be overlooked. The careful
programming put into Gabriel's appearance, the slight exaggeration built into its visual and
tactile dimensions, was meant to give it an impact somewhat greater than the real—the



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Realized—thing.

For the occasion Gabriel flew up to where his yacht, the Pyrrho, waited. He restrained himself
with tethers in a null-gee room and had his face constantly scanned by microwatt laser so that his
real expression could be transmitted to the skiagenos and that its facial expressions would be
Gabriel's own. In zero-gee he could move his real body in synch with the skiagenos in order to
enhance his illusion and the conviction of his performance.

The most important people in the Logarchy would be watching. He didn't intend to disappoint them.

Gabriel entered the oneirochronon and told his reno to establish a tachline link to Earth2. He
materialized his skiagenos in the virtual apartment he'd built in the dream Persepolis and looked
about him. The furniture, the hangings, all were as he remembered. Shadow-servants in the shapes
of fairy-tale bipedal animals moved toward him, triggered by his appearance. An oneirochronic
quintet were frozen in one corner, awaiting only the command to play.

Gabriel inspected the servants' livery and made certain it suited their somewhat inhuman shapes.
They hadn't been

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WALTER JON WILLIAMS

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animals at the last Graduation—their shapes (orange tabby, striped Olivian tetrapus, bright-eyed
otter) were a more recent whimsy. He made certain the animals' fur possessed the proper warmth,
softness, and resilience—there was even a slight crackle of static as he stroked them—then passed
on to the quintet. He triggered their action, gauged and adjusted the tone. The interpretation had
been borrowed from his own Residence chamber musicians. The musicians were dressed in eighteenth-
century Viennese court dress, white wigs and all.

Everything seemed ready. Gabriel froze the action and then left the suite through carven jade
doors.

The doors led to an underground corridor in the palace of Darius I that existed both in reality
and in the oneiro-chronic Persepolis. The first person Gabriel saw he recognized: Therapon
Protarchon Akwasibo, who had served under Gabriel decades before, when Gabriel was a very new,
very young Aristos.