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

adjacent Government Palace, found waiting ears among the faithful in the sacristy of St. Peter's
Basilica to the point that the archbishop saying Mass actually turned to look over his shoulder at
the unprecedented hiss and whispering of the congregation, and then moved out of the Basilica with
the departing worshipers into the larger crowds of St. Peter's Square where eighty to a hundred
thousand tourists and visiting Pax functionaries received the rumor like a critical mass of
plutonium being slammed inward to full fission.
Once out through the main vehicle gate of the Arch of Bells, the news accelerated to the speed
of electrons, then leaped to the speed of light, and finally hurtled out and away from the planet
Pacem at Hawking-drive velocities thousands of times faster than light. Closer, just beyond the
ancient walls of the Vatican, phones and comlogs chimed throughout the hulking, sweating Castel
Sant'Angelo where the offices of the Holy Office of the Inquisition were buried deep in the
mountain of stone originally built to be Hadrian's mausoleum. All that morning there was the
rattle of beads and rustle of starched cassocks as Vatican functionaries rushed back to their
offices to monitor their encrypted net lines and to wait for memos from above.
Personal communicators rang, chimed, and vibrated in the uniforms and implants of thousands of
Pax administrators, military commanders, politicians, and Mercantilus officials. Within thirty
minutes of the discovery of the Pope's lifeless body, news organizations around the world of Pacem
were cued to the story: they readied their robotic holocams, brought their full panoply of in-
system relay sats on-line, sent their best human reporters to the Vatican press office, and
waited. In an interstellar society where the Church ruled all but absolutely, news awaited not
only independent confirmation but official permission to exist.
Two hours and ten minutes after the discovery of Pope Julius XIV'S body, the Church confirmed
his death via an announcement through the office of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal
Lourdusamy. Within seconds, the recorded announcement was tightcast to every radio and holovision
on the teeming world of Pacem.
With its population of one and a half billion souls, all born-again Christians carrying the
cruciform, most employed by the Vatican or the huge civilian, military, or mercantile bureaucracy
of the Pax state, the planet Pacem paused to listen with some interest. Even before the formal
announcement, a dozen of the new archangel-class starships had left their orbital bases and
translated across the small human sphere of the galaxy arm, their near-instantaneous drives
instantly killing their crews but carrying their message of the Pope's death secure in computers


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and coded transponders for the sixty-some most important archdiocese worlds and star systems.
These archangel courier ships would carry a few of the voting cardinals back to Pacem in time for
the election, but most of the electors would choose to remain on their homeworlds -- foregoing
death even with its sure promise of resurrection -- sending instead their encrypted, interactive
holo wafers with their eligo for the next Supreme Pontiff.
Another eighty-five Hawking-class Pax ships, mostly high-acceleration torchships, made ready to
spin up to relativistic velocities and then into jump configurations, their voyage time to be
measured in days to months, their relative time-debt ranging from weeks to years. These ships
would wait in Pacem space the fifteen to twenty standard days until the election of the new Pope
and then bring the word to the 130-some less critical Pax systems where archbishops tended to
billions more of the faithful. Those archdiocese worlds, in turn, would be charged with sending
the word of the Pope's death, resurrection, and reelection on to lesser systems, distant worlds,
and to the myriad colonies in the Outback.
A final fleet of more than two hundred unmanned courier drones was taken out of storage at the