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

Boadacea. Things made on this planet were usually labelled that generally,
as though any place in the world were like any other, but this was both
true and not true. Druidsfall was unmistakably Boadacean, but as the
central city of the traitors it was also distinctively itself. Those
buildings with their curtain walls of petrified corpses, for instance....
Luckily, custom now allowed Simon to stay clear of those grim monuments,
now that the first, disastrous formalities were over, and seek his own bed
and breakfast. In the old, disinterestedly friendly inns of Druidsfall, the
anonymous thumps and foreign outcries of the transients-in death, love, or
trade-are said to make the regular lodgers start in their beds with their
resident guilts. Of course all inns are like that, but nevertheless, that
was why traitors liked to quarter there rather than in the Traitors' Halls
run by the fraternity: It guaranteed them privacy, and at the same time
helped them to feel alive. There is undoubtedly something inhibiting about
trying to deal within walls pieced together of broken stone limbs, heads,
and torsos, some of which had 21
 A Style In Treason
clearly been allve when the foundations were being dug and the scaffolding
bolted together.
Thus, here in The Skopolamander, Simon could comfortably await his next
contact, now that he had dumped his poisons. This--if there was to be
one-would of course have to come about before the end of his immunity
period. "Quarantine" was perhaps a more appropriate term.
No, the immunity was real, however limited, for as a traitor to High Earth
he had special status. High Earth, the Boadaceans thought, was not
necessarily Old Earth-but not necessarily not, either. For the rest of his
twelve days, Simon would not be killed out of sheer conservatism, at least,
though nobody official would attempt to deal with him, either.
He had eight of those days still to run-a dull prospect, since he had
already completed every possible preliminary to going to ground, and spiced
only by the fact that he had yet to figure out how long a day might
officially be. The rhythms of Flos Campi offered no reliable clues his Sol-
tuned diurnalism could read. At the moment there was nothing lighting the
window of the room but an aurora, looking like a curtain of orange and hazy
blue fire licking upward along a bone trestle. Radio around here, and prob-
ably even electrical power, must be knocked out as much as half the time,
with so much stray magnetism washing back and forth. That might prove
useful; he filed the thought.
In the meantime, there went the last of the poisons. Simon poured water
from an amphora into the catch basin, which promptly hissed like a dragon
just out of the egg and blurted a mushroom of cold blue steam which made
him cough. Carefill he thought; acid after water, never water after acid-I
am forgetting the most elementary lessons. I should have used wine. Time
for a drink, in Gro's name!
He caught up his cloak and went out, not bothering to lock the door. He had
nothing worth stealing but his honour, which was in his right hip pocket.
Oh, and of course, High 22
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Earth-that was in his left. Besides, Boadacea was rich: one could hardly