"H. Beam Piper - Graveyard of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

The woods were autumnтИТtinted now and the fields were bare and brown.

They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be
going out for the wineтИТpressing. That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed
that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among
the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills
above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the
planetтИТтИТPoictesmeтИТтИТtold that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were
rediscovering James Branch Cabell.

*****

Funny how much was coming back to him nowтИТтИТthings he had picked up from the minimal liberalтИТarts and
generalтИТhumanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech

Graveyard of Dreams 2
 Graveyard of Dreams
studies.

The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythologyтИТтИТOdin and
Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the
discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle
of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything.

Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of
Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshotтИТsized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight
on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and halfтИТpiratical adventurer
whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets.

FortyтИТtwo planets in all, from a couple of methaneтИТgiants on Gamma to airless little things with oneтИТsixth
Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So
Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first
landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp
grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.

Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphereтИТdomed
factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissueтИТculture
foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and
Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it.

Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem
and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in
the face of the growing selfтИТsufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of
spaceтИТfreighting.

Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a tenтИТmileтИТsquare desert of
crumbling concreteтИТтИТempty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brushтИТchoked parade grounds