"George R. R. Martin - Dying of the Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

again into the darkness of the Fringe, past the
Last Stars, into the Great Black Sea of intergalactic emptiness.
Those were the restless centuries, when High Kavalaan and the other outworlds were tasting their first pride and
growing anxious to find a place in the shattered histories of humanity. And everyone knows what happened. The
Wheel of Fire had always been the glory of the outworlds, but it had been a planetless glory, until now.
There was a century of storms as Worlorn neared the light: years of melting ice and volcanic activity and
earthquakes. A frozen atmosphere came, bit by bit, to life, and hideous winds howled like monster infants. All this
the outworlders faced and fought.
The terraformers came from Tober-in-the-Veil, the weather wardens from Darkdawn, and there were other teams
from Wolfheim and Kimdiss and ai-Emer-el and the World of the Blackwine Ocean. The men of High Kavalaan
supervised it all, since High Kavalaan claimed the rogue. The struggle took more than a century, and those who died
are still half-myth to the children of the Fringe. But at last Worlorn was gentled. Then cities rose, and strange forests
flowered beneath the light of the Wheel, and animals were set loose to give the planet life.
In ai-589 the Festival of the Fringe opened, with Fat Satan filling a quarter of the sky and his children bright
around him. On that first day the Toberians let their stratoshield shimmer, so the clouds and the sunlight ran and
swirled in kaleidoscope patterns. Other days followed, and the ships came. From all the outworlds, and from worlds
beyond, from Tara and Daronne on the other side of the Veil, from Avalon and Jamison's World, from places as
distant as New-holme and Old Poseidon and even Old Earth itself. For five standard years Worlorn moved toward
perihelion; for five it moved away. In ai-599 the Festival closed.
Worlorn entered twilight, and fell toward night.

Chapter 1

Beyond the window, water slapped against the pilings of the wooden sidewalk along the canal. Dirk t'Larien
looked up and saw a low black barge drift slowly past in the moonlight. A solitary figure stood at the stern, leaning
on a thin dark pole. Everything was etched quite clearly, for Braque's moon was riding overhead, big as a fist and
very bright.
Behind it was a stillness and a smoky darkness, an unmoving curtain that hid the farther stars. A cloud of dust and
gas, he thought. The Tempter's Veil.
The beginning came long after the end: a whisper-jewel.
It was wrapped in layers of silver foil and soft dark velvet, just as he had given it to her years before. He undid its
package that night, sitting by the window of his room that overlooked the wide scummy canal where merchants
poled fruit barges endlessly up and down. The gem was just as Dirk recalled it: a deep red, laced with thin black
lines, shaped like a tear. He remembered the day the esper had cut it for them, back on Avalon.
After a long time he touched it.
It was smooth and very cold against the tip of his finger, and deep within his brain it whispered. Memories and
promises that he had not forgotten.
He was here on Braque for no particular reason, and he never knew how they found him. But they did, and Dirk
t'Larien got his jewel back.
"Gwen," he said quietly, all to himself, just to shape the word again and feel the familiar warmth on his tongue.
His Jenny, his Guinevere, mistress of abandoned dreams.
It had been seven standard years, he thought, while his finger stroked the cold, cold jewel. But it felt like seven
lifetimes. And everything was over. What could she want of him now? The man who had loved her, that other Dirk
t'Larien, that maker-of-promises and giver-of-jewels was a dead man.
Dirk lifted his hand to brush a spray of gray-brown hair back out of his eyes. And suddenly, not meaning to, he
remembered how Gwen would brush his hair away whenever she meant to kiss him.
He felt very tired then, and very lost. His carefully nurtured cynicism trembled, and a weight fell upon his
shoulders, a ghost weight, the heaviness of the person he had been once and no longer was. He had indeed changed
over the years, and he had called it growing wise, but now all that wisdom abruptly seemed to sour. His wandering
thoughts lingered on all the promises he had broken, the dreams he had postponed and then mislaid, the ideals