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

And suddenly everyone is fighting.

"Inviz" was mainly a fashion statement in Bruno's day, one of many geostat patterns that seemed to hold
stationary while your clothes and body swirled around them. In set theory terms, inviz was the special
case of geostat in which the display pattern matched the background pattern. But in the hands of an artful
dresser it became something more, something beautiful. A complement to the other nonspectral
colors--superblack and superreflector, wellwood and glowhoo, animorphic and animimetic and the
ever-popular c0unt rs ns . How he misses those! How he misses the fops and dandies who strutted
around in them, with hardly a care!

But on the wellcloth cloaks of Sydney Lyman's band, stealth inviz is just another instrument of murder.
The Olders lift their hoods and vanish, or nearly vanish, leaving only smudges in the air and dancing
shadows on the ground. They must be wearing speed boots and wall-hugging gecko gloves as well, for in
what seems no time at all, the air is shimmering on top of the wall itself, and the guards there are dropping
their weapons, dropping their helmets, staggering and falling in disarray. Struggling vainly with unseen
assailants.
"Harm no one!" Radmer commands, and it occurs to Bruno to wonder whether he's speaking to his own
men, or to the city guards, or to the world of Lune itself, with a frustration that borders on despair. Here
is a man, thinks Bruno, who knows combat all too well, and loves it not at all. He feels a moment of
pity, for the earnest young man who had long ago dreamed himself a builder, just as Bruno had dreamed
himself a physicist. But the moment passes, for this whole world is like a nightmare, and there's a great
deal Bruno doesn't know. He'll take nothing for granted, and he feels--perhaps foolishly--that nothing can
truly surprise him, or move him. He's beyond all that.

Old-fashioned cast iron bells are ringing up on the wall now--alarms from the guards close enough to
observe the fray but not close enough to be caught in it. Still, the gate--a simple affair of welded steel
bars and plates--swings slowly open on squealing hinges, and Radmer strides casually into the city. Not
waiting to be summoned like a dog, Bruno trails close behind.

The city within could have been clipped straight from Bruno's Old Girona childhood: an environment of
stone and brick and heat-trapping colored glass. A cluster of hundred-story towers stands anomalously
at the center, ringed by artful moats and bridges, but few of the other buildings are more than six floors
high, and (per Radmer's warning) none seem enlivened. Between them, streets of diamond and
cobblestone and muddy gravel slope gradually down toward the seashore.

And on the streets are crowds of dwarfish, big-headed men and women dressed in drab spectral colors.
Fluttering gray shadows cling beneath their chins and eyelids, the undersides of their arms. Reactive skin
pigment--an adaptation generally used for shedding heat. These people are Eridanians, he thinks at first,
but on the heels of that he notices other engineered features as well: the six-fingered, dual-thumbed hands
of Sirius, a hint of the thick, trollish skins of Barnardean extremists. Also the occasional head of
translucent blue-green hair--a photosynthetic adaptation that had started right here in Sol System, under
the very nose of a disapproving Queen Tamra.

At the moment, these strange, patchwork people are scurrying back or fleeing outright, their eyes wide
on the opened gate. "Olders!" some of them cry.

"What are they?" Bruno asks quietly.

"They call themselves тАШhuman beings,'" Radmer answers without irony. "They're the people of Lune."