"Philip Jose Farmer - Riverworld 4 - The Magic Labyrinth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

he'd not foreseen this situation.

The Ethical was living in a bamboo leaf-thatched hut on the bank of The River,
the right bank if you faced upstream. He hadn't been there long. Now he sat on
the thick short grass of the plain near the shore. There were approximately
five hundred others around him, all waiting for lunchtime. At one time, there
would have been seven hundred here, but, since the resurrections had ceased,
the population had lessened. Accidents, mostly from encounters with the
gigantic human-eating boat-smashing riverdragon fish, suicide, and murder, had
accounted for most fatalities. Once, war had been the greatest death-maker,
but there had been none in this area for many years, the would-be conquerors
had been killed off, and now they would not be translated elsewhere along The
River to make more trouble.

Also, the spread of the Church of the Second Chance, the Nichirenites, the
Sufis, and other pacifistic religions and disciplines had had great effect in
bringing peace.

Near the crowd was a mushroom-shaped structure of a red-flecked granite
material. It was called a grailstone, though actually it was a highly
electrically conductive metal. It had a broad base five feet high, and the top
had a diameter of approximately fifty feet. On the surface of this were seven
hundred depressions. In each one was a cylinder of gray metal, a device which
converted energy discharged by the grailstone into food, liquor, and other
items. The containers kept the vast population of the Riverworld, estimated to
have been thirty-five to thirty-six billion at one time, from starving to
death. Though the grail-provided food could be augmented by fish and acorn
bread and the tips of young bamboo shoots, these were not enough to feed the
dwellers of the narrow Valley, a valley which enclosed The River, ten million
miles long.

The people by the stone chattered and laughed and kidded around. The Ethical
did not speak to those near him; he was occupied with his thoughts. It had
occurred to him that perhaps the malfunction of the satellite was not natural.
Its tracking mechanism was designed to function for over a thousand years
without breakdown. Had it failed because Piscator, the Japanese once named
Ohara, had messed up something in the tower? Theoretically Piscator should
have been destroyed by

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4 I Philip Jose Farmer

the various traps that he, X, had placed in the tower or been caught in a
stasis field installed by the Operator. But Piscator was a Sufi, and he might
have had the intelligence and perceptive powers to avoid these. That he could
enter the tower showed that he was very ethically advanced. Not one in five
million of the candidates, the resurrected Terrestrials, could have gone
through the entrance on top. As for the one at the base, only that had been
prepared by X, and only two knew about it until the expedition of ancient