"Daniel Keys Moran - Armageddon Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

"Second Precept of Semi-Divinity," said Georges, "is 'Don't Worry About It.' "

"I shall not worry about it, then," said Jalian hesitantly, "butтАж who is Ine-stine?"

"Well," said Georges comfortably, "that's rather a long story. You see..."

They walked away down the freeway together.

In the spot they had vacated, for five meters in either direction, the iron railings were completely free of
rust.

And so it came to be that Jalian d'Arsennette and Georges Mordreaux walked the freeways of the world
together, for a while.

Let us note, here, the two Precepts of Semi-Divinity:

(1) Mind Thine Own Business.

(2) Don't Worry About It.

The alien gods came to Earth in the early part of the twenty-eighth century, as measured from the death
of a man who was nailed to a tree for telling people that it was all right to love each other.

Their landing craft dropped out of a clear blue summer sky, and set down on a strip of what appeared,
to them, to be a sort of primitive road. They sought the civilization that would produce such a road, and
found nothing.
 They were not surprised, these alien gods. They had seen other deathworlds; they recognized the signs.
If they were surprised in any degree, it was only by the obvious recency of the cataclysm; the previous
owners of this world had destroyed themselves less than a cycled running cycle ago.

The alien godsтАФthe Corvichi spacetime gypsiesтАФset down to work. The Ship that was their world was
in trouble. Biosphere degradation, resource depletion, failing machinery, they had traveled a long, long
way around the Great Wheel of Existence, had braved the Chained One and Chaos itself, and much of
their equipment was designed to operate on timelines whose physical law was vastly different from the
one on which they now found themselves.

And so they set to work.

Three days after they set down, eighty of Clan SilvereyesтАЩ most blooded Hunters climbed onto the
steelstone of the Big Road, and began the long, long run toward the ship.

Many of the women wore the white of Elder Hunter; they did not lag behind their younger comrades.

At their head was a woman named Ralesh, who would one day be Eldest Hunter.

DATELINE 712 A.B.C.


In the Clan House, well past sunset, lights glowed and flickered. The flicker came from the central fire