"Dan Simmons - The rise of Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

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On the week that Pope Julius died for the ninth time and Father Dur├й was murdered for the fifth
time, Aenea and I were 160,000 light-years away on the kidnapped planet Earth -- Old Earth, the
real Earth -- circling a G-type star that was not the sun in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy
that was not the Earth's home galaxy.



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It had been a strange week for us. We did not know that the Pope had died, of course, since
there was no contact between this relocated Earth and Pax space except for the dormant farcaster
portals. Actually, I know now, Aenea was aware of the Pope's demise through means we did not
suspect then, but she did not mention events in Pax space to us and no one thought to ask her. Our
lives on Earth during those years of exile were simple and peaceful and profound in ways that are
now hard to fathom and almost painful to recall. At any rate, that particular week had been
profound but not simple or peaceful for us: the Old Architect with whom Aenea had been studying
for the last four years had died on Monday, and his funeral had been a sad and hasty affair out on
the desert that wintry Tuesday evening. On Wednesday, Aenea had turned sixteen, but the event was
overshadowed by the pall of grief and confusion at the Taliesin Fellowship and only A. Bettik and
I had tried to celebrate the day with her.
The android had baked a chocolate cake, Aenea's favorite, and I had worked for days to whittle
an elaborately carved walking stick out of a sturdy branch we had found during one of the Old
Architect's compulsory picnic expeditions to the nearby mountains. That evening we ate the cake
and drank some champagne in Aenea's beautiful little apprentice shelter in the desert, but she was
subdued and distracted by the old man's death and the Fellowship's panic. I realize now that much
of her distraction must have come from her awareness of the Pope's death, of the violent events
that were gathering on the future's horizon, and of the end of what would be the most peaceful
four years we would ever know together.
I remember the conversation that evening of Aenea's sixteenth birthday. It had grown dark early
and the air was chill. Outside the comfortable stone-and-canvas home she had built four years
earlier for her apprenticeship challenge, the dust was blowing and the sagebrush and yucca plants
rasped and contorted in the wind's grip. We sat by the hissing lantern, traded our champagne
glasses for mugs of warm tea, and talked softly beneath the hiss of sand on canvas.
"It's strange," I said. "We knew he was old and ill, but no one seemed to believe that he would
die." I was speaking of the Old Architect, of course, not of the distant Pope who meant so little
to us. And, like all of us on the exiled Earth, Aenea's mentor had not carried the cruciform. His
death was final in the way the Pope's could not be.
"He seemed to know," Aenea said softly.
"He's been calling in each of his apprentices for the past month. Imparting some last bit of
wisdom."
"What last bit of wisdom did he share with you?" I asked. "I mean, if it's not a secret or too
personal."
Aenea smiled over the steaming mug of tea.
"He reminded me that the patron will always agree to pay twice what the bid was if you send