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

"Then," she said, "on August 15, 1914, a worker at Taliesin went crazy, killed Mamah Borthwick
and her son John and daughter Martha with a hatchet, burned their bodies, set fire to the
compound, and then killed four of Mr. Wright's friends and apprentices before swallowing acid
himself. The entire place burned down."
"My God," I whispered, looking toward the dining hall where the cybrid Old Architect was having
lunch with a few of his oldest apprentices even as we spoke.


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"He never gave up," said Aenea. "A few days later, on August 18, Mr. Wright was touring an
artificial lake on the Taliesin property when the dam he was standing on gave way and he was swept
into a rain-swollen creek. Against all odds, he swam out of the torrent. A few weeks later he
started to rebuild."
I thought that I understood then what she was telling me about the Old Architect. "Why aren't
we at that Taliesin?" I asked as we strolled away from the bubbling fountain in the desert
courtyard.
Aenea shook her head. "Good question. I doubt if it even exists in this rebuilt version of
Earth. It was important to Mr. Wright, though. He died here ... near Taliesin West ... on April 9,
1959, but he was buried back near the Wisconsin Taliesin."
I stopped walking then. The thought of the Old Architect dying was a new and disturbing
thought.
Everything about our exile had been steady-state, calm and self-renewing, but now Aenea had
reminded me that everything and everyone ends. Or had, before the Pax introduced the cruciform and
physical resurrection to humanity. But no one at the Fellowship -- perhaps no one on this
kidnapped Earth -- had submitted to a cruciform.
That conversation had been three years earlier. This morning, the week after the cybrid Old
Architect's death and incongruous burial in the small mausoleum he had built out in the desert, we
were ready to face the consequences of death without resurrection and the end of things.

While Aenea went off to the bath and laundry pavilion to wash up, I found A. Bettik and the two
of us got busy with spreading the word of the meeting in the music pavilion. The blue-skinned
android did not act surprised that Aenea, the youngest of us, was calling and leading the meeting.
Both A. Bettik and I had watched silently over the past few years as the girl became the locus of
the Fellowship.
I jogged from the fields to the dormitories, from the dormitories to the kitchen -- where I
rang the large bell set in the fanciful bell tower above the stairway to the guest deck. Those
apprentices or workers whom I did not contact personally should hear the bell and come to
investigate.
From the kitchen, where I left cooks and some of the apprentices taking their aprons off and
wiping their hands, I announced the meeting to people having coffee in the large Fellowship dining
room (the view from this beautiful room looked north toward the McDowell peaks, so some had
watched Aenea and me return and knew that something was up), and then I poked my head in Mr.
Wright's smaller, private dining room -- empty -- and then jogged over to the drafting room. This
was probably the most attractive room in the compound with its long rows of drafting tables and
filing cabinets set under the sloping canvas roof, the morning light flooding in through the two
rows of offset windows. The sun was high enough now to fall on the roof and the smell of heated
canvas was as pleasant as the butter-rich light. Aenea had once told me that it was this sense of
camping out -- of working within the confines of light and canvas and stone -- that had been the