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

I looked around. The lantern light was enough to fill the little tent structure, but outside it
was dark and the wind howled. "Then the Core can reach here?"
Aenea shook her head. We had held this discussion before. I had not understood the concept
then.
I did not understand it now.
"These cybrids are connected to AI's which aren't really part of the Core," she said. "Mr.
Wright's persona wasn't. My father ... the second Keats cybrid ... wasn't."
This was the part I had never understood. "The Cantos said that the Keats cybrids -- including
your father -- were created by Ummon, a Core AI. Ummon told your father that the cybrids were a
Core experiment."
Aenea stood and walked to the opening of her apprentice shelter. The canvas on either side
rippled with the wind, but kept its shape and held the sand outside. She had built it well.
"Uncle Martin wrote the Cantos," she said. "He told the truth as best he could. But there were
elements he did not understand."
"Me too," I said and dropped the matter.
I walked over and put my arm around Aenea, feeling the subtle changes in her back and shoulder
and arm since the first time I had hugged her four years earlier. "Happy birthday, kiddo."
She glanced up at me and then laid her head against my chest. "Thank you, Raul."
There had been other changes in my youthful friend since first we met when she was just turning
twelve, standard. I could say that she had grown to womanhood in the intervening years, but
despite the rounding of her hips and obvious breasts beneath the old sweatshirt she wore, I still
did not see her as a woman. No longer a child, of course, but not yet a woman. She was ... Aenea.
The luminous dark eyes were the same -- intelligent, questioning, a bit sad with some secret
knowledge -- and the effect of being physically touched when she turned the attention of her gaze
on you was as strong as ever.
Her brown hair had grown somewhat darker in the past few years, she had cut it the previous
spring -- now it was shorter than mine had been when I was in the Home Guard military on Hyperion
a dozen years earlier, when I set my hand on her head the hair was barely long enough to rise
between my fingers -- but I could see some glints of the old blond streaks there, brought out by
the long days she spent working in the Arizona sunlight. As we stood there listening to the
blowing dust scraping canvas, A. Bettik a silent shadow behind us, Aenea took my hand in both of
hers. She might have been sixteen that day, a young woman rather than a girl, but her hands were
still tiny in my huge palm.
"Raul?" she said. I looked at her and waited. "Will you do something for me?" she said softly,
very softly.
"Yes." I did not hesitate.
She squeezed my hand and looked directly into me then. "Will you do something for me tomorrow?"
"Yes."
Neither her gaze nor the pressure on my hand let up. "Will you do anything for me?" This time I
did hesitate. I knew what such a vow might entail, even though this strange and wonderful child
had never asked me to do anything for her -- had not asked that I come with her on this mad
odyssey. That had been a promise I had made to the old poet, Martin Silenus, before I had even met


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Aenea. I knew that there were things that I could not -- in good conscience or bad -- bring myself
to do. But foremost among those things I was incapable of doing was denying Aenea.
"Yes," I said, "I will do anything you ask."