"Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 08 - The Chantry Guild" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

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CHAPTER

A little before dawn, Amanda Morgan woke in the front room of the tiny apartment rented by the family
which had risked giving her shelter. A young girl shared the front room floor with her; but she still
slumbered, as did the rest.

Amanda had slept in the shapeless brown smock that had been all but forced on the inhabitants of this
world and its sister planet of Mara by the Occupation Forces now ruling them. She rose now without
putting on her ankle-high bush boots, and squatted on her heels beside her borrowed sleeping mat, and
rolled it up.

Stowing it in a corner of the room and picking up the boots in one hand, she quietly let herself out into
the hall. Still carrying the boots, she went along it to make use of the communal bathroom at the hall's
end; then descended the narrow wooden stairs into the street.

Just inside the tenement's street door, she stopped to put on the boots. The smock had a hood, which
she now pulled up over her head to hide her face. Silently, lifting the latch of the door, she slipped out
into the mist-dimmed, pre-dawn light of the empty streets of Porphyry. It was a small town in the
subtropical uplands of Hysperia, the northeastern continent of the Exotic planet of Kultis.

Through those streets between the graying, unpainted wood faces of the tenements, she went swiftly.
Most of the local Exotics, rooted out of their countryside homes, had been brought here and required to
build these dwellings for their own shelter, close under the eye of authority; and the fact that the required
design and materials of the buildings made them firetraps had not been entirely unintentional on the part of
the designers. For the plan behind the Occupation was for the Exotics of Mara and Kultis to die off-as
much as possible by their own doing.

She thought of those sleeping within; and felt a sensation as if her heart moved under her breast at the
thought of leaving them, as a mother might react at having to leave her children in the hands of brutal and
antagonistic caretakers. But the word that had been sent her was the one message that could override all
else; and she had no choice but to go.
 After several turnings down different streets she slipped between two buildings and emerged into the