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

We are not stuff that abides, but xiii patterns that perpetuate themselves.
-- Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine


The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds the figure
of a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, next for a man, next
for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship
for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.
-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations


But here is the finger of God, a flash of the will that can, Existent behind all laws, that
made them and, lo, they are!


file:///F|/rah/Dan%20Simmons/Simmons,%20Dan%20-%2004%20-%20The%20Rise%20of%20Endymion.txt (1 of 319) [1/15/03 6:08:23 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Dan%20Simmons/Simmons,%20Dan%20-%2004%20-%20The%20Rise%20of%20Endymion.txt

And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, That out of three sounds he
frame, not a fourth sound, but a star.
-- Robert Browning, Abt Vogler


If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will but [sic] you
in the place where I began in this series of thoughts -- I mean, I began by seeing how man was
formed by circumstances -- and what are circumstances? -- but touchstones of his heart -- his and
what are touch stones? -- but proovings [sic] of his hearrt [sic]? -- and what are the proovings
[sic] of his heart but fortifiers or alterers of his nature? and what is his altered nature but
his soul? -- and what was his soul before it came into the world and had These provings and
alterations and perfectionings? -- An intelligences [sic] -- without Identity -- and how is this
Identity to be made? Through the medium of the Heart? And how is the heart to become this Medium
but in a world of Circumstances? -- There now I think what with Poetry and Theology you may thank
your Stars that my pen is not very longwinded -
-- John Keats, In a letter to his brother




PART ONE

1

"The Pope is dead! Long live the Pope!"
The cry reverberated in and around the Vatican courtyard of San Damaso where the body of Pope
Julius XIV had just been discovered in his papal apartments. The Holy Father had died in his
sleep. Within minutes the word spread through the mismatched cluster of buildings still referred
to as the Vatican Palace, and then moved out through the Vatican State with the speed of a circuit
fire in a pure-oxygen environment. The rumor of the Pope's death burned through the Vatican's
office complex, leaped through the crowded St. Anne's Gate to the Apostolic Palace and the