"Matthew Hughes - A Herd of Opportunity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Matt)

A Herd of Opportunity by Matthew Hughes
Journey now, dear reader, to the penultimate age of Old Earth, an eon before Jack Vance's Dying
Earth. Here we encounter a time when all has been mapped and everything is known.

Now consider the Commons, the collective unconscious wherein all our dreams are made
manifest. Brave are the nonauts who venture into this realm.

Yes folks, we have here a new tale of Guth Bandar (last seen in our Oct/Nov. 2005 issue). This
story flashes back to Bandar's younger days and suggests that perhaps there is something new
under the sun.
****
"Say nothing. I shall do all the talking," Preceptor Huffley had whispered to Guth Bandar as they'd
entered the low-ceilinged stone hut. So now the young student sat on the hard wooden chair near the
door, hands neatly folded, as his elderly teacher chaffered with the Eminence Malabar, the
white-bearded ascetic who was head of this cloistered settlement.

"How will you proceed?" said the Eminence.

Huffley's hand idly stirred the air. "Oh, the usual approach. Assess the elements, delineate the
parameters, identify the paradigm, adjust the interactions."

The patriarch's brow creased. "We did not pay an exorbitant cost to bring you and your assistant all the
way from Old Earth for assessments and delineations," he said. "Action is required, preferably vigorous,
decisive and prompt. Our reflections will suffer as long as that intolerable racket continues."

"Indeed," said the preceptor. "Then we had best be about it."

"I will show you," said the patriarch.

He led the way out of the hut and across the Sequestrance. Bandar followed his teacher, his eyes taking
in the details of the place. They crossed a central open space floored in swept hardpan and surrounded
by neat rows of domed, windowless huts built of the ubiquitous dun-colored stone that, along with
pebbles and grit, comprised all that Bandar had yet seen of this remote and lightly settled world called
Gamza they had traveled halfway down The Spray to reach. A larger dome stood on the far side of the
square, low roofed but roomy enough to hold all of the settlement. Bandar glanced within its broad,
arched entrance and saw that the bare floor was covered with rows of wide, flat bowls of polished
wood, with a woven meditation mat beside each bowl.

To his right, dozens of robed and sandaled men labored in the garden to coax straggling rows of legumes
from the uncooperative soil, while others pumped water from a central well and carried it by yoke-borne
buckets to irrigate the furrows. The high white sun directly overhead must steam the moisture from the
dirt almost as soon as it was delivered, Bandar thought, feeling rivulets of sweat trickle down his back
and chest under his two-piece traveling suit.

Their path angled away from the main building and Bandar surmised that they were heading for the
Sequestrance's encircling wall--or not quite encircling, he noticed. The barrier, three times as high as
Bandar was tall, was still under construction, although it must soon be finished. In the gap he saw two
other crews working quickly: one group used a fragmenter to break bedrock into manageable chunks,
while the other stacked the pieces to shape the wall. A brawny man with a shoulder-slung aggregator
then melded the serried rocks into a smoothness.