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

"The only thing I can say with confidence is that they probably won't be the same mistakes."

The sound of wind chimes floated on the wind, and then the unreal sound of a reed flute. Gabriel
and Akwasibo turned toward the Apadana, the great hall of Darius I.

Over the dream-city drifted a dream-moon, half full in a mild blue sky. The real Luna after which
it was modeled had long been more Realized than most places—its interior had now been transformed,
molecule by molecule, into a huge data store, one of many that made up the Hyperlogos, the
universal data pool. Save for that under the Seal of the Aris-toi, almost every bit and byte of it
was accessible, something that contributed more to peace in the Logarchy than all the social
engineers in history.

"I'm a bit nervous," Akwasibo confessed. "What sort of thing goes on at these receptions?"

16

WALTER JON WILLIAMS

17

"Pleasure. Display. Rivalry. Intrigue." Gabriel smiled. "Everything that makes life worth living."

The palati pollen floated through Illyricum's breathless dawn air. Gabriel rose from the bench,
and Manfred picked himself up, stretched, yawned yet again, and followed Gabriel from the
pavilion. Fading motes of dawn danced in Gabriel's path as he returned to the main building of the
Residence.

As he walked past the Shadow Cloister he heard a mumbled, weary chant, and remembered that he'd
received a report that the Therapon Dekarchon Yaritomo, the demiourgos in charge of tax assessment
for one of Illyricum's provinces, had announced he would ere long attempt the ritual of Kavandi.
Gabriel told Manfred to wait for him and stepped quietly through a turquoise-encrusted archway to
watch the ordeal.

Yaritomo was a stocky man not quite seventeen, a recent graduate of Lincoln College at Illyricum
University. He had performed well at the duties that Gabriel had set him in order to acquaint him
with the basics of civil administration. Reports from the Psychological Department indicated that
Yaritomo's personality had shown a tendency to avoid fragmentation by milder techniques, and
Kavandi was his own choice.

Yaritomo was naked beneath the metal frame he had strapped to his body. The frame held over fifty
stainless-steel spears, all surgically sharp, all pointed inward to his skin.



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Above him was the Shadow Mask on its pillar, the giant robot face—gears, pneumatic systems, and
hologram projectors—that Gabriel had designed for his play Mask. The Shadow Mask was set in an