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

One of the men went to one knee and seemed to be listening. Then he nodded to the others and
phase-shifted. One second he was flesh and bone and blood and skin and hair, the next he was a
chrome-silver sculpture in the form of a man.
The blue sky, burning forest, and lake of molten fire reflected perfectly on his shifting
silver skin. He plunged one arm into the molten pool, crouched lower, reached deeper, and then
pulled back. The silver form of his hand looked as if it had melted onto the surface of another
silver human form -- this one a woman. The male chrome sculpture pulled the female chrome
sculpture out of the hissing, spitting cauldron of lava and carried it fifty meters to a point
where the grass was not burning and the stone was cool enough to hold their weight. The other man
and woman followed. The man shifted out of his chrome-silver form and a second later the female he
had carried did the same. The woman who emerged from the quicksilver looked like a twin of the
short-haired woman in the shipsuit.
"Where is the bitch child?" asked the rescued female. She had once been known as Rhadamanth
Nemes.
"Gone," said the man who rescued her. He and his male sibling could be her brothers or male
clones. "They made the final farcaster."
Rhadamanth Nemes grimaced slightly. She was flexing her fingers and moving her arms as if
recovering from cramps in her limbs. "At least I killed the damned android."
"No," said the other woman, her twin. She had no name. "They left in the Raphael's dropship.
The android lost an arm, but the autosurgeon kept him alive."
Nemes nodded and looked back at the rocky hillside where lava still ran. The glow from the fire
showed the glistening web of the monofilament over the river. Behind them, the forest burned.
"That was not ... pleasant ... in there. I couldn't move with the full force of the ship's lance
burning down on me, and then I could not phase-shift with the rock around me. It took immense
concentration to power down and still maintain an active phase-shift interface. How long was I
buried there?"
"Four Earth years," said the man who had not spoken until now.
Rhadamanth Nemes raised a thin eyebrow, more in question than surprise. "Yet the Core knew
where I was ... "
"The Core knew where you were," said the other woman. Her voice and facial expressions were
identical to those of the rescued woman. "And the Core knew that you had failed."
Nemes smiled very thinly. "So the four years were a punishment."
"A reminder," said the man who had pulled her from the rock.
Rhadamanth Nemes took two steps, as if testing her balance. Her voice was flat.
"So why have you come for me now?"
"The girl," said the other woman. "She is coming back. We are to resume your mission."
Nemes nodded.
The man who rescued her set his hand on her thin shoulder. "And please consider," he said,
"that four years entombed in fire and stone will be nothing to what you may expect if you fail
again."
Nemes stared at him for a long moment without answering. Then, turning away from the lava and
flames in a precisely choreographed motion, matching stride for stride, all four of them moved in
perfect unison toward the dropship.

On the desert world of Madre de Dios, on the high plateau called the Llano Estacado because of
the atmosphere generator pylons crisscrossing the desert in neat ten-kilometer grid intervals,
Father Federico de Soya prepared for early morning Mass.
The little desert town of Nuevo Atlan held fewer than three hundred residents -- mostly Pax
boxite miners waiting to die before traveling home, mixed with a few of the converted Mariaists
who scratched out livings as corgor herders in the toxic wastelands -- and Father de Soya knew