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

had disappeared for days on end. This time, however, I was more concerned than usual: the death of
the Old Architect had left the twenty-seven apprentices and the sixty-some support people at the
desert camp -- which is what the Old Architect called Taliesin West -- anxious and uneasy. The
dust storm added to that anxiety, as dust storms always do. Most of the families and support staff
lived close by, in one of the desert-masonry dormitories Mr. Wright had his interns build south of
the main buildings, and the camp complex itself was almost fortlike with its walls and courtyards
and covered walkways -- good for scuttling between buildings during a dust storm -- but each
successive day without either sunlight or Aenea made me increasingly nervous. Several times each


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day I went to her apprentice shelter: it was the farthest from the main compound, almost a quarter
of a mile north toward the mountains. She was never there -- she had left the door untethered and
a note telling me not to worry, that it was just one of her excursions and that she was taking
plenty of water -- but every time I visited I appreciated her shelter more. Four years earlier,
when she and I had first arrived with a dropship stolen from a Pax warship, both of us exhausted,
battered, and burned, not to mention with an android healing in the ship's autosurgeon, the Old
Architect and the other apprentices had greeted us with warmth and acceptance. Mr. Wright had not
seemed surprised that a twelve-year-old child had come across world after world via farcaster to
find him and to ask to be his apprentice. I remember that first day when the Old Architect had
asked her what she knew of architecture -- "nothing," Aenea had replied quietly, "except that you
are the one I should learn from."
Evidently this had been the correct response. Mr. Wright had told her that all of the
apprentices who had arrived before her -- all twenty-six others, as it turned out -- had been
asked to design and build their own shelters in the desert as a sort of entry exam. The Old
Architect had offered some crude materials from the compound -- canvas, stone, cement, a bit of
cast-off lumber -- but the design and effort were up to the girl.
Before she set to work (not being an apprentice, I made do with a tent close to the main
compound), Aenea and I toured the other apprentice shelters. Most were variations on tent-shacks.
They were serviceable and some showed style -- one particularly exhibited a nice design flare
but, as Aenea pointed out to me, would not keep the sand or rain out with the slightest wind --
but none was particularly memorable.
Aenea worked eleven days on her shelter. I helped her do some of the heavy lifting and a bit of
the excavating (A. Bettik was still recovering at that time -- first in the autosurgeon, then in
the compound's infirmary), but the girl did all of the planning and most of the work. The result
was this wonderful shelter that I visited four times a day during this, her last hiatus in the
desert. Aenea had excavated the main sections of the shelter so that most of it was below ground
level. Then she had set flagstones in place, making sure that they fit tightly, to create a smooth
floor. Over the stones she set colorful rugs and blankets she traded for at the Indian Market
fifteen miles away. Around the excavated core of the home she set walls that were about a meter
high, but with the sunken main room, they seemed taller. They were constructed of the same rough
"desert masonry" that Mr. Wright had used in building the walls and superstructure of the main
compound buildings and Aenea used the same technique, although she had never heard him describe
it.
First, she gathered stones from the desert and the many arroyos and washes around the hilltop
compound. The rocks were of every size and color -- purple, black, rusty reds, and deep umbers --
and some held petroglyphs or fossils. After gathering the stones, Aenea built wooden forms and set
the larger rocks in with their flat sides against the inside face of the form. She then spent days