"Continuing Time - 98 - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

the deadliest human being who ever lived, or is ever likely to. It is said of
Ola Blue that she was death itself, and sorrow: Ola Blue herself said that if
nightways had not existed, she would have created it.
It has been one hundred and thirty-seven years since Shelomin Serendip abolished
the Regency of United Earth. Today Earth has no domestic government; no courts
and no judges and no police. What it does have is United Earth Intelligence and
its College, and both institutions are only tools of the Face of Night.
All of these figuresЧthe mere thousands of years that human civilization itself
has existedЧare only small fractions of the near 65 millennia that have passed
since the Zaradin ended the Time Wars, and disappeared; and the Continuing Time
began.
The Continuing Time itself is young; the Time Wars raged for three and a half
billion years; and there are events in history earlier than that.



BOOK ONE:
THE MAN-SPACETHING WAR
2676-2681 Asimov
Summer 26, 2676 Asimov.
His heart beat like a drum.
He had attuned himself to the place, to the deliberate rhythm of the wilderness.
Walking alone beneath the blue sky of alien Earth, through a forest vaster than
any on November, Tyrel November had emptied his mind of analytical thought, and
moved through the wilderness as one who belonged.
By dawn on his third day away from the College Tyrel knew himself followed.
It shook him out of his reverie, and he resented it near as much for that as for
the danger it posed. He camped that night without a fire, in that part of the
Great North Forest called Washington, not far south of Canada. He got himself
high up in a spruce pine, gentled his breathing and his heart, cooled the
surface of his skin to the ambient for the surrounding air, and waited for
morning.
High summer, and a gentle wind that held scents whose names he did not know. On
the first day of his trek he had seen a brown bear, but he had been upwind of
it. He could pick out a few scents, here and there beneath the sharp overlay of
the pine; deer and running water strong among them.
Humans could be found not two hundred and sixty klicks to the west, if Tyrel
felt the need to go to them, clustered in small cities along the coast of the
Pacific Ocean. With EarthТs population down below four billion, people were
perhaps rarer than they had once beenЧbut by the standards of a man from
November, a world where a quarter of EarthТs population had spread itself across
three times EarthТs land surface, they were plentiful enough.
He did not feel the need to seek out human company. His follower, perhaps a
night face, knew little woodcraft. It was a rare art on Earth; and if the forest
through which Tyrel traveled was not the same forest in which he had been
raised, well, it was not very different. Wilderness has its own reason, and the
wilderness of November is, with rare notable exceptions, largely that of Earth,
transplanted four hundred light years.
He knew himself followed, and it was enough.