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

in the broiling sun, shoveling sand from the washes and carting it back to her building site in
wheelbarrows, mixing it there with cement to form the concrete that held the stones in place as
the mixture hardened. It was a rough concrete/stone concoction -- desert masonry, Mr. Wright
called it -- but it was strangely beautiful, the colorful rocks showing through the surface of the
concrete, fissures and textures everywhere. Once in place, the walls were about a meter high and
thick enough to hold out the desert heat in the daytime and hold in the inner heat at night. Her
shelter was more complex than it first appeared to the eye -- it was months before I appreciated
the subtle tricks she had pulled in its design.
One ducked to enter the vestibule, a stone-and-canvas porte cochere with three broad steps
leading one down and around to the wood and masonry portal that served as the entrance to the main
room. This twisting, descending vestibule acted as a sort of air lock, sealing out the desert sand
and harshness, and the way she had rigged the canvas -- almost like overlapping jib sails --
improved the air-lock effect. The "main room" was only three meters across and five long, but it
seemed much larger. Aenea had used built-in benches around a raised stone table to create a dining
and sitting area, and then placed more niches and stone seats near a hearth she had fashioned in
the north wall of the shelter. There was an actual stone chimney built into the wall, and it did
not touch the canvas or wood at any point. Between the stone walls and the canvas -- at about eye
height when seated -- she had rigged screened windows that ran the length of the north and south
sides of the shelter. These panoramic viewslits could be battened down by both canvas and sliding
wood shutters, operated from the inside. Overhead, she had used old fiberglass rods found in the
compound junk heap to shape the canvas in smooth arches, sudden peaks, cathedral vaults, and odd,
folded niches.
She had actually fashioned a bedroom for herself, again removed from the main room by two steps
twisted at sixty-degree angles, the entire niche built into the gently rising slope and set back


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against a huge boulder she had found on the site. There was no water or plumbing out here -- we
all shared the communal showers and toilets in the compound annex -- but Aenea had built a lovely
little rock basin and bath next to her bed (a plywood platform with mattress and blankets), and
several times a week she would heat water in the main kitchen and carry it to her shelter, bucket
by bucket, for a hot bath.
The light through the canvas ceilings and walls was warm at sunrise, buttery at midday, and
orange in the evening. In addition, Aenea had deliberately placed the shelter in careful relation
to saguaros, prickly pear bushes, and staghorn cactus so that different shadows would fall on
different planes of canvas at different times of day. It was a comfortable, pleasant place. And
empty beyond description when my young friend was absent.
I mentioned that the apprentices and support staff were anxious after the Old Architect's
death. Distraught might be a better word. I spent most of those three days of Aenea's absence
listening to the concerned babble of almost ninety people -- never together, since even the dinner
shifts in the dining hall were spaced apart because Mr. Wright had not liked huge crowds at dinner
-- and the level of panic seemed to grow as the days and dust storms went by. Aenea's absence was
a big part of the hysteria: she was the youngest apprentice at Taliesin -- the youngest person,
actually -- but the others had grown used to asking advice of her and of listening when she spoke.
In one week, they had lost both their mentor and their guide. On the fourth morning after her
birthday, the dust storms ended and Aenea returned. I happened to be out jogging just after
sunrise and saw her coming across the desert from the direction of the McDowell Mountains: she was
silhouetted in the morning light, a thin figure with short hair against the corona brilliance, and