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

mirrored reflections.
They stumbled out into the Chamber of Parliament with shocking abruptness.
One moment they had been in the Hall of Mirrors; an instant later they were not, and
there was no doorway to be seen. That alone did not startle the children, for there
were such Gates at home as well, though they were always well marked and did not
vanish at the other end.
But the Chamber of Parliament was not what they had expected.
Oh, they had audited descriptions of it, to be sure, and seen holos, but that was
not sufficient to prepare them for the sheer grand spectacle of it.
The structure itself was laid in an open clearing hundreds of meters across,
nestled high in the Black Mountains. An ancient landpad, its once-brilliant landing
markers covered with the dirt of ages, was, with the Chamber of Parliament itself, all
there was to be found in that clearing.
None of that, to be sure, startled them at all.
ButтАж the ceiling hung full fifteen meters above them, sculpted gold and silver,
without any physical structure supporting it. The walls rose eight meters around
most of the perimeter of the Chamber, to the south and east and west, and then
dropped to touch the floor at the north end, so that the entire north quadrant was
open to the air. From any seat within the Chamber one could look down, north, and
see the ancient landpad, and beyond it, the entirety of the Valley. Rows of seats rose
in a tier around the center of the Chamber, enough seats to accommodate hundreds
at once. Dusty white marble covered most of the Chamber. A single spire of black
marble, with gleaming veins of gold, thrust up two meters south of the exact
northernmost point of the Chamber, the podium from which the Rulers of Earth had
addressed one another on formal occasions.
"This is where the Rulers had meetings," said Loga. The expression on his face
was unreadable; the index finger of the glove on his right hand was gray from the
thick layer of dust he had traced off of the surface of the podium. "Here they tried to
bring everyone togetherтАФCain and Maston, Warriors and Workers, and the
GiantsтАж"
The boy who had questioned Loga about his reference to Eden, a grave-faced
five-year-old named Innelieu, said, "How do you know, Loga?"
"Hmm?" Loga looked over at the boy absently. "How do I know? It does not
matter."
The child refused to be turned away from his question. "Were you there?"
Loga considered the question. At length he said slowly, "There was a man named
Loga, and he was there, yes. But that was a long time ago, and things were very
much different, then, than they are now." He turned his back on them and looked
back out over the Valley. Someday he would have to stop making this trip, give the
burden over to another. The children needed it, needed to touch the soil from which
their people had sprung, to breathe the air of the planet that Loga still thought of as
home.
But perhaps Loga was not the one to bring them. Perhaps he would wait a couple
of decades and load the job down on one such as Innelieu, for whom the beauty of
Earth would be unmixed with the pain of memory.
"Will you tell us about it?"
Amazing, thought Loga, after all these years, a question I have never been asked
before. He had no intention of telling any of them anything about the childhood of
their race, about the horrors that the Rulers and the Workers and the Giants had
inflicted upon each other. They were far too youngтАж