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

stopped.
The acoustics were good in Mr. Wright's music pavilion, but Aenea had always been able to
project her voice without seeming to raise it.
She spoke softly. "Thank you for gathering. I thought we should talk."
Jaev Peters, one of the older apprentices, immediately stood up in the fifth row. "You were
gone, Aenea. In the desert again."
The girl on the stage nodded.
"Did you talk to the Lions and Tigers and Bears?"
No one in the audience tittered or giggled.
The question was asked in deadly seriousness and the answer was awaited by ninety people just
as seriously. I should explain.
It all began in the Cantos Martin Silenus wrote more than two centuries ago.
That tale of the Hyperion pilgrims, the Shrike, and the battle between humanity and the
TechnoCore explained how the early cyberspace webs had evolved into planetary dataspheres. By the
time of the Hegemony, the AI TechnoCore had used their secret farcaster and fatline technologies
to weave hundreds of dataspheres into a single, secret, interstellar information medium called the
megasphere. But, according to the Cantos, Aenea's father -- the cybrid John Keats -- had traveled
in disembodied datapersona form to the megasphere's Core and discovered that there was a larger
datumplane medium, perhaps larger than our galaxy, which even the Core AI's were afraid to explore
because it was full of "lions and tigers and bears" -- those were Ummon the AI's words. These were
the beings -- or intelligences -- or gods, for all we knew -- who had kidnapped the Earth and
brought it here before the Core could destroy it a millennium ago. These Lions and Tigers and
Bears were the bugaboo guardians of our world.
No one in the Fellowship had ever seen any of these entities, or spoken to them, or had any
solid evidence of their existence. No one except Aenea.
"No," said the girl on the stage, "I didn't talk to them." She looked down as if embarrassed.
She was always reticent to talk about this. "But I think I heard them."
"They spoke to you?" said Jaev Peters. The pavilion was hushed.
"No," said Aenea. "I didn't say that. I just ... heard them. A bit like when you overhear
someone else's conversation through a dormitory wall."
There was a rustle of amusement at this. For all the thick stone walls on the Fellowship
property, the dorm partitions were notably thin.
"All right," said Bets Kimbal from the first row. Bets was the chief cook and a large, sensible
woman. "Tell us what they said."
Aenea stepped up to the edge of the red-carpeted stage and looked out at her elders and
colleagues. "I can tell you this," she said softly. "There'll be no more food and supplies from
the Indian Market. That's gone."
It was as if she had set off a grenade in the music pavilion. When the babble began to subside,


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one of the biggest of the construction workers, a man named Hussan, shouted over the noise.
"What do you mean it's gone? Where do we get our food?"
There was good reason for the panic. In Mr. Wright's day, way back in the twentieth century,
his Fellowship desert camp had been about fifty kilometers from a large town called Phoenix.
Unlike the Depression-era Wisconsin Taliesin, where apprentices raised crops in the rich soil even
while they worked on Mr. Wright's construction plans, this desert camp had never been able to grow
its own food. So they drove to Phoenix and bartered or paid out their primitive coins and paper