"Blish, James - Anywhen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

worlds, had fallen into a kind of autumn cannibalism. In defiance of that
saying of Ezra-Tse, the edge was attempting to eat the centre. it was this
worship of independence, or rather, of autonomy, which had not only made
treason respectable, but had come nigh on to ennobling it ... and was now
imperceptibly emasculating it, -like the statues one saw everywhere in
Druidsfall which had been defaced and sexually mutilated by the grey
disease of time and the weather.
Today, though all the Boadaceans proper were colonials in ancestry, they
were snobs about their planet's prehuman history, as though they had not
nearly exterminated the aborigines themselves but ' were their inheritors.
The few shambling Charioteers who still lived stumbled through the 27
 A Style in Treason

streets of Druidsfall loaded with ritual honours, carefully shorn of real
power but ostentatiously deferred to on the slightest occasion which might
be noticed by anyone from High Earth. In the meantime, the Boadaceans sold
each other out with delicate enthusiasm, but against High Earth -which was
not necessarily Old Earth, but not necessarily not, either-all gates were
formally locked.
Formally only, Simon and High Earth were sure, for the hunger of treason,
like lechery, tends to grow with what it feeds on, and to lose
discrimination in the process. Boadacea, like all forbidden fruits, should
be ripe for the plucking, for the man with the proper key to its neglected
garden.
The key that Simon had brought with him, that enormous bribe which should
have unlocked Valkol the Polite like a child's bank, was temporarily
useless. He would have to forge another, with whatever crude tools could be
made to fall to hand. The only one accessible to Simon at the moment was
the dead playwoman's gently despised half-brother.
His name, Simon had found. out from her easily enough, was currently Da-Ud
tam Altair, and he was Court Traitor to a small religious principate on the
Gulf of the Rood, on the InContinent, half the world away from Druidsfall.
Remembering what the vombis aboard the Karas had said about the library of
the Rood-Prince, Simon again assumed the robes of a worn-out Sagittarian
divine in search of a patron, confident that his face, voice, stance, and
manner were otherwise utterly unlike his shipboard persona,'and boarded the
flyer to the InContinent prepared to enjoy the trip.
There was much to enjoy. Boadacea was a good-sized world, nearly ten
thousand miles in diameter, and it was rich in more than money. Ages of
weathering and vulcanism had broken it into many ecological enclaves,
further diversified by the point-by-point uniqueness of climate contributed
to each by the rhythmic inconstancies of Flos Campi and the fixity of Flos
Campi's companion sun among the other 28
 A Style in Treason
fixed stars-and by the customs and colours of many waves of pioneers who had
settled in those enclaves and sought to re-establish their private visions
of the earthly paradise. It was an entirely beautiful world, could one but
forget one's personal troubles long enough to really look at it; and the
flyer flew low and slow, a procedure Simon approved despite the urgency the
transduction serum was imposing upon the back of his mind.