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

At that moment I knew that I was lost -- and resurrected.
Aenea did not speak then, but only nodded, squeezed my hand a final time, and turned back to
the light, the cake, and our waiting android friend. On the next day I was to learn what her
request truly meant, and how difficult it would be to honor my vow.

I will stop for a moment. I realize that you might not know about me unless you have read the
first few hundred pages of my tale, which, because I had to recycle the microvellum upon which I
wrote them, no longer exist except in the memory of this 'scriber. I told the truth in those lost
pages.
Or at least the truth as I knew it then. Or at least I tried to tell the truth. Mostly. After
having recycled the microvellum pages of that first attempt to tell the story of Aenea, and
because the 'scriber has never been out of my sight, I have to assume that no one has read them.
The fact that they were written in a Schr├╢dinger cat box execution egg in exile orbit around the
barren world of Armaghast -- the cat box being little more than a fixed-position energy shell
holding my atmosphere, air and food recycling equipment, bed, table, 'scriber, and a vial of
cyanide gas waiting to be released by a random isotope emission -- would seem to have insured that
you have not read those pages. But I am not sure.
Strange things were happening then. Strange things have happened since. I will reserve judgment
on whether those pages -- and these -- could ever have been, or ever will be, read. In the
meantime, I will reintroduce myself. My name is Raul Endymion, my first name rhyming with tall --
which I am -- and my last name deriving from the "abandoned" university city of Endymion on the
backwater world of Hyperion. I qualify the word "abandoned" because that quarantined city is where
I met the old poet -- Martin Silenus, the ancient author of the banned epic poem the Cantos -- and
that is where my adventure began.
I use the word "adventure" with some irony, and perhaps in the sense that all of life is an
adventure. For it is true that while the voyage began as an adventure -- an attempt to rescue
twelve-year-old Aenea from the Pax and to escort her safely to the distant Old Earth -- it has
since become a full lifetime of love, loss, and wonder.
Anyway, at the time of this telling, during the week of the Pope's death, the Old Architect's
death, and Aenea's inauspicious sixteenth birthday in exile, I was thirty-two years old, still
tall, still strong, still trained mostly in hunting, brawling, and watching others lead, still
callow, and just teetering on the precipice of falling forever in love with the girl-child I had
protected like a little sister and who -- overnight, it seemed -- had become a girl-woman whom I
knew now as a friend. I should also say that the other things I write of here -- the events in Pax
space, the murder of Paul Dur├й, the retrieval of the female-thing named Rhadamanth Nemes, the
thoughts of Father Federico de Soya -- are not surmised or extrapolated or made-up in the way that
the old fiction novels were in Martin Silenus's day. I know these things, down to the level of
Father de Soya's thoughts and Councillor Albedo's apparel that day, not because I am omniscient,
but because of later events and revelations that gave access to such omniscience.
It will make sense later. At least I hope it will.
I apologize for this awkward reintroduction.
The template for Aenea's cybrid father -- a poet named John Keats -- said in his last letter of
farewell to his friends, "I have always made an awkward bow." In truth, so have I -- whether in
departure or greeting or, as is perhaps the case here, in improbable reunion.
So I will return to my memories and ask your indulgence if they do not make perfect sense at my
first attempt to share and shape them.

The wind howled and the dust blew for three days and three nights after Aenea's sixteenth
birthday. The girl was gone for all that time. Over the past four years I had grown used to her
"time-outs," as she called them, and I usually did not fret the way I had the first few times she