"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 04 - Seeds of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

the vines were surely sturdy enough to bear his weight. He was also happy that he did not have to trust
his estimate. His target was low, near the ground, and here it was, glinting in the skylight just enough to
see. He reached out one hand to touch the glass. It moved.
He had been in the Center that afternoon, working in his lab, studying the copies of the Worldtree's
ceramic plaques that spelled out the basics of his field. A smudge had impelled him to seek out the
archive, to check the original, and it was passing through the Great Hall on that errand that he had found
the key, set down and forgotten. Where he found it told him what it must fit.
His recognition of the moment he had long awaited had paralyzed him where he stood. But he had
unfrozen before anyone could think his odd posture worth a question. He had palmed the key. Then...
It had taken only minutes more to find this window and set it ajar.
And no one had closed it.
Once that would have been unthinkable. Once there had been guards who patrolled all of Worldtree
Center, finding and closing off every route by which a stranger, an enemy, might invade.
He swung the window wide and clambered over the sill into a small room. The dim skylight revealed a
toilet, a door, and a sink. Beside the sink was a roll of paper towels.
When his feet clung to the tile floor, he stopped. He wished he had had the foresight to know that
honeysuckle nectar would spill, that he would walk in the sticky stuff, that it would cover his hands. He
wished he had known he would leave such unmistakable signs of his presence.
But if he had no foresight, he had luck. The Remakers must have smiled upon his plan when they led
him to use the window in this room.
He dampened a fistful of towels at the sink and scrubbed the worst of the stickiness from his fur and
hands and feet. Only then did he slip through the door into the dim-lit corridors beyond.
A mounted suit of ancient warrior armor-- helm and breastplate and skirt of metal strips-- made him
start, but only for a moment. No one, no one real and live and apt to question his presence there, seemed
to be in the building. There were no lines of light beneath office doors. No distant voices, no click of
claws on floor tiles, no echoes of closing doors.
There was no telling how long the silence would last. Surely there were still a few guards to patrol the
building and protect its treasures. Surely they would come by soon, too soon.
He stopped. Was that... ? No. Some small animal, scurrying above the ceiling panels. A creak of the
building's fabric.
He hurried, and when the corridor he followed debouched into the building's central chamber, he
stopped again. Near one end of the vast room was the tenth-scale Worldtree, at its foot a small stepped
pyramid on which the priests held forth each week, new students dedicated their lives to learning, and
officials of Worldtree Center took their oaths of office.
There were more displays of armor and weapons and the inventions that marked the ascent of
Rackind from their raw beginnings. There was the great mural that covered the long far wall with a
depiction of all Rac history from the creation to the building of Worldtree Center. Though the light was
dim, it glowed with a brilliance of its own, or perhaps of memory. Every Rac knew this painting's every
detail as if it were the pattern of his fur.
There was the valley filled with opposing armies that trampled moss and honeysuckle alike. There
were the great box kites, anchored by wheeled winches, that had lifted observers above the battle. There
was that one observer who had called for more rope and let the wind lift and lift and lift, until he could
drop from his kite to the flange that ringed the Worldtree's top. His deed had earned him a new name,
Kitewing, and made him a hero for all of time.
When he looked at that portion of the mural, Dotson touched the side of his flattened, chinless muzzle
in an abbreviated version of the Rac greeting gesture. Few ever denied Kitewing that token of respect,
for legend had always said that the Remakers had left a trove of knowledge in the chamber atop the
Worldtree and that those Racs who possessed the valley and the Worldtree would, as soon as they
could reach its top, rule the world.
Not that war had stopped after Kitewing hoisted the first rope ladder up the Worldtree and brought