"H. Beam Piper - The Cosmic Computer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon
ahead, and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks.
Below, the fields were bare and brown, and the woods were
autumntinted. They had been green with new foliage when he had
last seen them, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink
blossom. Must have gotten the crop in early, .on this side of
the mountains. Maybe they were still harvesting, over in the
Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was going to the
winepressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot of cask
staves going aboard at Storisende.

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six
years ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that
had been melon fields recently,

3

among the new forests that had grown up in the past forty years.
The few stands of original timber towered above the second
growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet
had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the
Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told
that-Surromanticist Movement, when they were rediscovering James
Branch Cabell. Old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and
half-piratical space-rover whose ship had been the first to
enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the romantic writers of
the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets of the Alpha
System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from
Spenser's Faerie Queene, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of
course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one
had been called Storisende.


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Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing
Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member
Republic in the Terran Federation. The other planets were
uninhabitable except in airtight dome cities, but they were rich
in minerals. Companies had been formed to exploit them. No food
could be produced on any of them except by carniculture and
hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper to produce it
naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.