"Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

war belonging to the entire world of Lune. And it's going badly, and as near as Bruno can determine, this
places the entire human race at risk.

He glances up at the Murdered Earth, visible as a puckered distortion in the evening sky. The sun has set
behind the mountains here, but the sky is still bright, alive with clouds of fierce orange and yellow. And
behind them, the tortured rainbow of sunlight refracting around the centimeter-wide fleck of
hypercondensed matter that was once the world--the one and only world--of human beings. It is, in truth,
a tragically beautiful sight.
There is a Murdered Venus as well, and a Murdered Mars--crushed into black holes virtually
indistinguishable from Earth's--and Bruno has no reason to suspect the other planets, especially the gas
giants, have been spared in the years of his exile. That leaves only the moons and asteroids and planettes,
many of which had still been thriving in the Iridium Days--the last days Bruno can still remember. But
given the tendency of economic depressions to isolate vacuum habitats, slowly choking off the energies
and machineries of their air supply, it's doubtful any could have survived this long. That leaves only the
planettes, which of course have problems of their own, and cannot retain atmosphere indefinitely without
maintenance. Surely a great many of them have failed already.

And that leaves only Lune, that greatest of planettes, that living world squozen from the lifeless mass of
Earth's primordial moon. Squozen by Conrad Mursk, in fact, at the command of Bruno de Towaji.

"Well, it's really no problem of ours," adds Sidney Lyman. He points an elbow in Bruno's direction,
forcefully enough that Bruno half expects a Palace Guard to materialize from the ether to restrain him. But
the Guards are dust now, like the Queendom of Sol itself, and Lyman goes on. "We'll get this Ako'i
fellow back inside yonder walls, then scurry like hell to reach the veils of Echo Valley in time for sunset."

Which isn't saying much, Bruno muses, considering that sunset--judging from the angle of the sun and the
shadows of the trees--is still a good thirty-five hours away. The days are long here.

"He's not going тАШback' to Timoch," says Conrad Mursk. General Radmer, Bruno reminds himself. Not
Mursk. They call him General Emeritus Radmer. And I am Ako'i. "He's going to it."

"Ah! A first-timer. A virgin in the hallowed ancient halls of that mausoleum of a city. Come now, Ako'i,
one cannot dwell this long on Lune--" A thought seemed to strike him, then. "Oh, but you've been on
Varna! Marooned, cast away. For that long? Since before there was a Timoch? Since the Shattering
itself?"

"Possibly," Bruno grumbles, hoping to leave it at that. Tellingly, Lyman and his men have not recognized
the husk of their old king. They don't know his name, his crimes, his many failures, and he prefers it that
way. "Ako'i" isn't a name at all, but a Tongan epithet, something like calling a man "perfesser" or "genius"
or . . . or "de Towaji," yes. Perhaps they would forgive him if they knew, but what matter? Perhaps
Bruno might have forgiven himself, had he been himself these many, many centuries. But that doesn't
matter, either. He is here as a figure out of history, to correct a historical mistake. Or to try, anyway.

They pass through a field of grazing, bleating sheep with gold-colored wool and curiously oversized
heads. Then there are rock walls topped by wooden fences, leading down into a broad expanse of
fresh-mown corn stubble. Soon, they find themselves on an actual road, paved with a smooth, continuous
sheet of what looks like diamond or zirconium or some allotrope of silicon carbide. The surface is
flawless, but to Bruno's eye something about it conveys a sense of tremendous age. On one particularly
sharp curve, a mound of dirt has spread from the roadside to cover part of the road itself.