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

worth telling about at some other point in time: the ninety people of the Fellowship were decent,
complex, devious, and interesting in the way of all intelligent human beings, and their tales
should be told. Similarly, my explorations across Earth, both in the dropship and in the 1948
"Woody" station wagon that the Old Architect loaned me, might support an epic poem of their own.
But I am not a poet. But I was a tracker in my hunting-guide days, and my job here is to follow
the path of Aenea's growth to womanhood and messiahship without wandering down too many
sidetracks. And so I shall. The Old Architect always referred to the Fellowship compound as
"desert camp." Most of the apprentices referred to it as "Taliesin" -- which means "Shining Brow"
in Welsh. (Mr. Wright was of Welsh distraction. I spent weeks trying to remember a Pax or Outback
world named Welsh, before I remembered that the Old Architect had lived and died before
spaceflight.) Aenea often referred to the place as "Taliesin West," which suggested to even
someone as dull as me that there had to be a Taliesin East. When I asked her three years earlier,
Aenea had explained that the original Mr. Wright had built his first Taliesin Fellowship compound
in the early 1930's in Spring Green, Wisconsin -- Wisconsin being one of the political and
geographical sub-units of the ancient North American nation-state called the United States of
America.
When I asked Aenea if the first Taliesin was like this one, she had said, "Not really. There
were a series of Wisconsin Taliesins -- both homes and fellowship compounds -- and most were
destroyed by fire. That's one of the reasons Mr. Wright installed so many pools and fountains here
at this compound -- sources of water to fight the inevitable fires."
"And his first Taliesin was built in the 1930's?" I said.
Aenea shook her head. "He opened his first Taliesin Fellowship in 1932," she said. "But that
was mostly a way to get slave labor from his apprentices -- both for building his dream and
raising food for him -- during the Depression."
"What was the Depression?"
"Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state," Aenea said. "Remember, the economy
wasn't really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold
reserves, and the value of physical money -- actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed
to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930's, the
hallucination turned nightmare."
"Jesus," I said.
"Precisely," said Aenea. "Anyway, long before that, in 1909 A.D., the middle-aged Mr. Wright
abandoned his wife and six children and ran away to Europe with a married woman."
I admit that I blinked at this news. The thought of the Old Architect -- a man in his mid-
eighties when we had met him four years ago -- with a sex life, and a scandalous one at that, took
some getting used to. I also wondered what all this had to do with my question about Taliesin
East.
Aenea was getting to that. "When he returned with the other woman," she said, smiling at my
rapt attention, "he began building the first Taliesin -- his home in Wisconsin -- for Mamah ... "
"His mother?" I said, totally confused.
"Mamah Borthwick," said Aenea, spelling the first name for me. "Mrs. Cheney. The Other Woman."
"Oh."
The smile fading, she continued. "The scandal had destroyed his architectural practice and made
him a branded man in the United States. But he built Taliesin and forged ahead, trying to find new
patrons. His first wife, Catherine, would not give him a divorce. The newspapers -- those were
databanks printed on paper and distributed regularly -- thrived on such gossip and fanned the
flames of the scandal, not letting it die."
We had been walking in the courtyard when I asked Aenea the simple question about Taliesin, and
I remember pausing by the fountain during this part of her answer. I was always amazed at what
this child knew.