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

did not.
"Not the way we came," said Aenea. "But down the River Tethys. Across different worlds.
Across as many worlds as it takes to find the ship."
"The ship?" I said. We had left the Consul's spaceship hiding under a river, repairing itself
from damage sustained in our flight from the Pax, on a world whose name and location we did not
know. My young friend nodded and the shadows fled, then regrouped around her tired eyes. "We'll
need the ship, Raul. If you would, I'd like you to take this kayak down the River Tethys until you
find the ship, then fly back with it to a world where A. Bettik and I will be waiting."
"A world in Pax space?" I said, my stomach tightening another notch at the danger present in
that simple sentence.
"Yes."
"Why me?" I said, looking significantly at A. Bettik. I was ashamed at my thought then: Why
send a human being ... your best friend ... when the android can go? I lowered my gaze.
"It will be a dangerous trip," said Aenea. "I believe that you can do it, Raul. I trust you to
find the ship and then find us."
I felt my shoulders slump. "All right," I said. "Do we head back to where we came through the
farcaster before?" We had come through from God's Grove on a small stream near the Old Architect's
masterpiece building, Fallingwater. It was two thirds of a continent away.
"No," said Aenea. "Closer. On the Mississippi River."
"All right," I said again. I had flown over the Mississippi. It was almost two thousand klicks
east of here. "When do I go? Tomorrow?"
Aenea touched my wrist. "No," she said, tiredly but firmly. "Tonight. Right now."
I did not protest. I did not argue. Without speaking, I took the bow of the kayak, A. Bettik
took the stern, Aenea held the center steady, and we carried the damned thing back to the dropship
in the deepening desert night.



3

The Grand Inquisitor was late. Vatican Air/space Traffic Control routed the Inquisitor's EMV
across normally closed airspace near the spaceport, shut down all airborne traffic on the east
side of the Vatican, and held a thirty-thousand-ton robot freighter in orbital final approach
until after the GI'S car had flown across the southeast corner of the landing grid.
Inside the specially armored EMV, the Grand Inquisitor -- His Eminence John Domenico Cardinal
Mustafa -- did not glance out the window or at the video monitors at the lovely sight of the
approaching Vatican, its walls rosy in the morning light, or at the busy, twenty-lane highway
called the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele beneath them, glimmering like a sunlit river because of
sunlight on windshields and bubbletops. The Grand Inquisitor's attention was focused solely on the
intelligence update scrolling by on his comlog template. When the last paragraph had scrolled past
and was committed to memory and deleted to oblivion, the Grand Inquisitor said to his aide, Father
Farrell, "And there have been no more meetings with the Mercantilus?"
Father Farrell, a thin man with flat gray eyes, never smiled, but a twitch of his cheek muscle
conveyed the simulation of humor to the Cardinal. "None."
"You're certain?"
"Absolutely."
The Grand Inquisitor sat back in the EMV'S cushions and allowed himself a brief smile. The
Mercantilus had made only that one early, disastrous approach to any of the papal candidates --
the sounding out of Lourdusamy -- and the Inquisitor had heard the complete recording of that
meeting. The Cardinal allowed himself another few seconds of smile: Lourdusamy had been right to