"James P. Hogan - Craddle of Saturn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

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Title: Cradle of Saturn
Author: James P. Hogan



PROLOGUE
Times had always been plentiful. Since the beginning of the age when their ancestors first walked
in the world, the People had lived in harmony with the spirits and the elements. Their language
had no words for war or want, famine or drought. The forests were vast, the plains fertile. Fair
winds brought rain from warm oceans. All of life flourished in abundance.

***
No memory had been handed down of where the People came from.

Some taught that they were born of Neveya, who ruled the skies during the times of lesser light
when the smaller but brighter Sun was absent, and at the end of mortal life they would return to
her across the Golden Sea in which the world floated. They learned to farm the lands and tame
animals; to study the ways of wood, and stone, and metals; to admire and create music, likenesses,
and things of beauty. Their sages pondered over the mysteries of mind and the senses, life and
motion, of number and the nature of things. Communities grew under social imperatives and
marketplaces for ideas, and became centers of government and commerce.

***
Iryon stood near the mouth of a broad river, between arms of green hills rising to distant
mountains. It was not the largest of cities, but its buildings had been shaped and ornamented with
a care that made the whole as much an expression of art as the carved gates and gilded window
traceries, or the marble reliefs surrounding the central square. At the summit of one of the five
hills on which Iryon was built stood the Astral Temple, where priests of Neveya charted the cycles
of the heavens.

Each day began with the world looking out across the immensity of the celestial Ocean that
extended away to Neveya's orb, dividing it equally like the plane of a blade halving a water-fruit
so that only the upper hemisphere of Neveya was visible. Then the Ocean would rise, tilting and
narrowing as it did so until it became an edge crossing past the world to reveal briefly all of
Neveya's countenance; from there, now above, it broadened again to expand its underside, at the
same time obscuring Neveya's upper part to reach its half-day low, after which it would fall and
cross back again. This cycle repeated 5,623 times in the year that the stars took to turn through
their constellations.

The proportions of light and dark making up the days changed according to whether the Sun was
visible as well as Neveya, and in what situationтАФwhich varied with the seasons. The "blue hours"
came when the Sun shone from the far side of Neveya, transforming its normally orange glow into a
black shadow cast across the Golden Ocean. At certain times in the course of the year, as the
Ocean crossed past the world during the blue hours, the Sun would vanish behind Neveya completely,
turning day abruptly into darkest night. These were the times when the other worlds that moved
about Neveya revealed themselves in their full glories of form and color. They were known as the
days of "Dark Crossings." Multitudes would come from afar to Iryon to attend the rites and
ceremonies that took place on these occasions.