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

groan. For such a project, the wealth of Boadacea was a prerequisite, for
the Green Exarch drew tithes from six fallen empires older than manthe
wealth of Boadacea, and its reputation, which the vombis had invoked, as
the first colony to have broken with Old Earth.
And such a project would necessarily be of prime interest to a creature of
the Exarch. Yet security onit could not possibly have been broken. Simon
knew well that men had died horribly for travelling under such assumptions
in the past; nevertheless, he was sure of it. Then what-?
A steward walked slowly -through the salon, beating a gong, and Simon put
the problem aside for the moment and gathered up his cards.
"Druidsfall. One hour to Druidsfall. All passengers for the Flos Campi
system please prepare for departure. Druidsfall in one hour; next port of
call is Fleurety."
The Fool, he thought, has come to the Broken Tower. The next card to turn
might well be the Hanged Man.

CHAPTER TWO

Boadacea proved indeed to be an interesting world, and despite all of
Simon's preliminary reading and conditioning, quite as unsettling as the
vombis had predicted.
Its sun, Flos Campi, was a ninety-minute microvariable, twinned at a
distance of one light-year with a blue-white, 18
 A Style in Treason

Rigellike star which stood-or had stood throughout historical times-in high
southern latitudes. This meant that every spot on the planet had a different
cycle of day and night. Druidsfall, for example, had only four consecutive
hours of quasi-darkness at a time, and even during this period the sky was
indigo rather than black at its deepestand more often than not Haring with
auroras, thanks to the almost incessant solar storms.
Everything in the city, as everywhere on Boadacea, bespoke the crucial
importance of fugitive light, and the fadeout-fade-in weather that went
with it, all very strange after the desert glare of High Earth. The day
after the Karas had fluttered down had dawned in mist, which cold gales had
torn away into slowly pulsating sunlight; then had come clouds and
needlelike rain which had turned to snow and then to sleet-more weather in
a day than the minarets of Jiddah, Simon's registered home town, saw in a
six-month. the fluctuating light and wetness was reflected most startlingly
by its gardens, which sprang up when one's back was turned and did not need
so much to be weeded as actually fought. They were constantly in motion to
the ninety-minute solar cycle, battering their elaborate flowerheads
against back walls which were everywhere crumbling after centuries of such
soft, implacable impacts. Half the buildings in Druidsfall glistened with
their leaves, which were scaled with so much soft gold that they stuck to
anything they were blown against-the wealth of Boadacea was based anciently
in the vast amounts of uranium and other power-metals in its soil, from
which the plants extracted the inevitable associated gold-as radiation
shielding for their spuriously tender genes. Everyone one saw in the
streets of Druidsfall, or any other such city, was a mutation of some