"Brian Daley - Requiem For a Ruler of Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daley Brian)

The old chair hesitated a bit, rising. Weir waited for a bolt from the pinbeam, which hadn't yet been
completely adjusted. A wound from the weapon would serve his purpose; so would the intruder's
secreting of his body to conceal the evidence of a violent death. In either case, others would know that
an investigation was in order, and that precautions must be taken to safeguard the Inheritors. The old man
took the only course of action available to him.
The chair's hesitation gave Weir's foe a chance to leap forward, dropping the pinbeam, grappling. The
chair slewed around under their weight. Old, long unused, it sank to kick up tangles of ribbon grass. Then
the safeties cut in, and it stalled.
Weir's heart was fluttering in his chest like a dying bird. Blood ran from his nostrils and mouth. His
head lolled, then wobbled half erect. His assailant had gathered up the handgun again but held fire,
watching the old man.
Weir arched backward in sudden agony. A minute part of him was content that he'd provided as best
he could for the well-being of his little realm of nineteen stellar systems. But he also thought, Poor
Hobart Floyt!
He seemed to be watching a blinding white light, his torment retreating. Then he passed from life into
death.
The intruder felt for a pulse and found none. Weir was slumped in his chair. The storm struck; rain
falling in windblown sheets. Frostpile was a luminous white faerie city in the distance.
The assailant returned the player to Weir's lap, pondering. What could the inheritance left to an
obscure Earther possibly be? What machinations had Weir set in motion?


CHAPTER 1тАФTHE ROAD NOT TAKEN
The yearning's too big for the learning. His father's words came back to him as Alacrity Fitzhugh
gazed down into the abyss. The cold, eternal solidity of the granite blocks around him and the Earth
beneath him brought back that observation about the Third Breath of humankind.
Sol's light had already brightened the peak of Huyana Picchu, high above and to the left. Now it
touched Machu Picchu itself, casting long, vapor-filtered rays among the broken walls of the ages-old
Inca fortress city. Looking down, he saw mist breaking as it rose off the dark serpentine of the
Urubamba River more than half a kilometer below him.
 He inhaled it, a unique moment. Alacrity had overcome tremendous obstacles to make his way to
Earth and secure permission to walk its land, to see its seas and skies. A time of decision was drawing
near; he wanted to feel connected to something larger than himself, something kindred, while he
pondered. No surprise, then, that the words should come back to him.
"The yearning's too big for the learning," his father and captain had said. "Too big for measurement
and too big for poetry. The wishes and dreams are always there, in most of the sentient species. But
comes a time like this, when the dreams suddenly feel like they're within reachтАФthen an upwelling comes,
too big for the normal boundaries of life."
That seemed like poetry to Alacrity, and measurement, too, the thing his late father had said.
A fine, tenuous moisture, an evaporating cloud, was all around Machu Picchu, but it would be a clear
day. Alacrity eagerly anticipated seeing the Andean snowcaps from this spot. The weather was being
cooperative; now if only the damned groundlings would follow suit.
The site, in what had been Peru before the Terran Unification, was one of those he'd wanted most to
visit, one of the oldest. There were few enough left, thanks to the Human-Srillan War.
Giza was radioactive glass; the Parthenon had been hit during the last, mutually catastrophic Srillan
attackтАФwhat the Earthers called the Big Smear. Jerusalem was gone, Shih Huang-ti's tomb, Mecca,
Bethlehem, and Dharmsala. The old religions were only historical oddities here.
Srillan military thinkers, like their human counterparts, tended to target population centers in that war.
Aside from the people who'd been annihilated, most of Rome and its treasures had been vaporized, and
New York with its newer but still precious history. Sian and Moscow, Brazilia and Sydney, the same.