"Daniel Keys Moran - The Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

about within me, had at last come to being in me: and I quickly understood the very
essence of my own nature: the stream of life was not to flow to me from without, but
from within.
тАФRichard Wagner



The Children
The Year 3018 After the Fire
^┬╗
 In these, the Later Days of the Earth, Spring comes less quickly than in the youth
of the world, and flees sooner. Trees grow tall, untended oak and ash and walnut,
along the banks of the great river Almandar, and bring forth their leaves as the air
warms to the brief approaching summer. One huge patch of giant redwood spreads
slowly to the north of the Valley. Silence lies over what was once called the Valley of
the Rulers; from the north of the Valley, where the Great Dam keeps out the
encroaching water of the One Ocean; silence, down the hills and steppes across
which Almandar flows. Silence reigns in the buildings that are left standing now,
eons after man left Earth to the Dolphins. Gentle winds stir blossoms of cherry and
hyacinth, wild white orchids and the scarlet roses that are called Solan's Blood.
Birds break the silence now and again as Spring progresses, robins and crows
and bluebirds, fat pigeons, and seagulls by the thousands. Once a shrike blunders
into the airspace over the Valley, and weapons left dormant for thousands of turns
about the sun flare into life. Lasers designed to shear metal make short work of
feathers and hollow bone, and the bird falls with a single, almost human scream. The
Dolphins observe this from the waterlocks that overlook the Valley and chuckle their
pleasure to one another, for the shrikes are strong, fell creatures that have dragged
more than one Dolphin across the surface of the waves to a nearby grounding, and
made a meal of it.
Larger animals than birds pad quietly through the forests that have grown to fill
the Valley. Polar bears, less furred than the old breed from which they are
descended, are the foremost carnivores across the length of the Valley. Herds of
maverick horses run wild, and deer; beavers work along the river Almandar's length,
and trout and catfish and rainbow willies flash beneath its surface. The genegineered
treebunnies, with their grasping forehands, scamper through the tree-tops, their
passage contested only by the languid, almost disinterested descendants of the cats
who kept company with both Rulers and Workers in eons past.
North and east the Valley of the Rulers is ringed by the One Ocean, kept at its
distance by force fields and the Great Dam; to the south and west rise the
mountains. The Valley itself is not small; once there were eighty towns and villages
spread across its length, from the foot of the mountains to the Great Dam which
holds back the sea. At the north end of the Valley is the lake T'Pau, which is fed by
water filtered from the Ocean, and from which flows the river Almandar.
One with a penchant for the cynicalтАФone such as, say, the flame-haired Loga,
Lord of Light, who has seen more wars than friendships; he of many vices, who
rediscovered poker, craps, and rock and rollтАФone such as he might be tempted to
point out the resemblance between the Valley of the Rulers and the Eden of one of
man's early religions.
It is unlikely, of course, that such a comparison shall be made.
The Valley is empty, and has been so for long and long.