"Philip Jose' Farmer. The Green Odyssey (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

be run by donkey-engines. The ships themselves could have their wheels
powered by steam. Or perhaps, he thought, rails could be laid across the
Xurdimur, and locomotives would make the ships obsolete.

No, that wouldn't work. Iron rails cost too much. And the savages that
roved over the grassy plains would tear them up and forge weapons from
them.

Besides, every time he suggested to the Duke a new and much more efficient
method of doing something he ran dead into the brick wall of tradition and
custom. Nothing new could be accepted unless the gods accepted it. The
gods' will was interpreted by the priests. The priests clutched the status
quo as tightly as a hungry infant clutches its mother's breast or an old
man clings to his property.

Green could make a fight against the theocracy, but he didn't feel it was
worth while to become a martyr.

He heard a familiar voice behind him calling his name.

"Alan! Alan!"

He hunched his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing his head and thought
desperately for a moment of trying to ignore the voice. But, though a
woman's, it was powerful and penetrating, and everybody around him had
already turned to see its owner. So he couldn't pretend he hadn't heard it.

"ALAN, YOU BIG BLOND NO-GOOD HUNK OF MAN, STOP!"

Reluctantly Green told his rickshaw boy to turn around. The boy, grinning,
did so. Like everybody else along the harbor front he knew Amra and was
familiar with her relations with Green. She held their one-year-old
daughter in her arms, cradled against her magnificent bosom. Behind her
stood her other five children, her two sons by the Duke, her daughter by a
visiting prince, her son by the captain of a Northerner ship, her daughter
by a temple sculptor. Her rise and fall and slow rise again was told in
the children around her; the tableau embodied an outline of the structure
of the planet's society.

3

HER MOTHER had been a Northerner slave; her father, a native freeman, a
wheelwright. When she was five years old they had died in a plague. She
had been transferred to the Pens and raised by her aunt. When she was
fifteen her beauty had attracted the Duke and he had installed her in the
palace. There she gave birth to his two sons, now ten and eleven, who
would soon be taken away from her and raised in the Duke's household as
free and petted servants.

The Duke had married the present Duchess several years after his liaison