"Joseph Delaney - Lords Temporal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Joseph)

some-where nearby.
That changed everything, and Wyckoff s street savvy told him that this doorway was no place for him to
be. Though it would be comparatively warmer, he pre-ferred not to be in jail, even in winter. Some street
people did, and routinely provoked some incident at the first frost. These were usually the older dudes,
who'd lost that stamina Wyckoff still possessed and weren't good candidates for the press gangs, who sold
their dignity for three months out of each year.
Wyckoff knew some of them well. There was a guy called Silky, a giant black dude who claimed to have
been a prominent pimp in his younger days and who told endless stories about how things had been then.
Jails, he said, had been palaces, with clean cells and decent food, where an inmate could lie around and do
his time watching TV. Nobody worked on the roads, or cleaned public buildings, or was shipped off to algae
farms or sludge plants. The con's life was an easy life then.
Whose wasn't? To hear the old geezers talkтАФand WyckofF had, from the day he'd been old enough to
understandтАФthe quality of life had worsened with ev-ery generation. His own grandfather hadn't been em-
4 Joseph H. Delaney
ployable the last thirty years of his life, and he'd let the world know he didn't like that. His endless
complaints about the system constituted some of Wyckoff s earliest and most vivid memories.
Everybody knew the storyтАФhow the so-called Cold War between the United States and Russia had ruined
the economy of the whole world. It was history, rapidly becoming ancient history at that; but its effects
contin-ued to be felt with undiminished severity almost a century after the fact.
The SDI, they called it: Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars. America said she wanted it, though many
of her most illustrious scientists argued ably and at length that it wouldn't work.
They were wrong. To a man they were wrong. The SDI, though it failed technically for scientific reasons,
nevertheless worked perfectly and devastatingly, pre-cisely as western economists intended.
Because the only possible way to stop U.S. develop-ment of the system was to have the devastating
nuclear war it was meant to avoid, and because they were unwilling to trust their enemy to share the
technology as he said he would, the Russians had no choice. They had to try to match the effortтАФand
thereby tumbled neatly into the economic trap.
They did not at first understand this trapтАФor, more likely, did not appreciate that worldwide realities
oper-ated upon their fiscal system the same as on any other. And so by the time the situation's true
character was apparent, they were lost; they had spent too much of a national wealth that never had
matched that of their adversaries' to begin with. The result was economic chaos and political collapse.
In the United States the reaction had been joyous. A hundred years of nuclear bondage had come to an end
at last. Better yet, there now existed, thanks to the effort, a well-developed space technology. In near-Earth
orbit, satellite factories and cities had sprung up. At the LaGrange points, vast laboratories and workshops
had
lords temporal 5
been constructed, and a young mathematical physicist named Eric Aschenbrenner was busy trying to prove
that there was a way around the light-speed barrier. It was about this time that Wyckpff's grandfather had
left his prostrate Russian homeland and emigrated to the United States, now unquestionably the dominant
power on Earth.
Grandfather Wyckoff was a farmer of sorts. Raised and trained under the Russian system, he had
under-stood the theory of large-scale agriculture better than mostтАФwell enough, in fact, to move steadily
upward within the country's foremost agricorp.
But it was a long way down from the top. Grandfa-ther Wyckoff did not understand the reasons, while it
was happening, but he figured them out afterward, and spent the remainder of his life explaining them to
anyone he could persuade to listen.
Being a child, young Stanislaus had little choice in the matter. Grandfather was around constantly, with
nothing to do, and he was often lonely. Worse, there was a bitterness in him that his double portion of
calam-ity could only fortify. He had emerged from one decay-ing economy just in time to witness the
collapse of another; this time, that of the entire world.