"Roger Taylor - Prisoner Of History" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Roger)

He looked out the window again. A haze of evaporating water that obscured the
base of the mountains and a faint streak of green growth showed where the
efforts of the prison workforce were beginning to bear fruit. That was the
visible result of his own work. He looked down at his hands. They were scarred
and calloused from the labor of the last five years. He could almost tell when
each scar had been made. Previously, the hardest work his hands had known was
the turning of pages of ancient manuscripts. But everything he had done at the
University was meaningless. Now, it was only the labor that these hands had done
that had any reality. Everything else had been obliterated because he had gone
to the wrong meeting.

He ran the pen down the lines on the page. Tears came to his eyes when he
checked the entry that read I accept the kind invitation of His Most August
Majesty Chankrondor XXV to become a Citizen Colonist on the Colony World of
T'arnp'ur. His fingers were shaking so much that his signature wasn't even
legible.

The Emperor Chankrondor IV, when released from imprisonment, had returned to his
summer palace. There it was that the usurper Krandpot phi and his highest
ranking followers were being held in the deepest subdungeon by the commander of
the loyalist troops, who had fought for the freedom of the Emperor. To show the
fate of traitors, the Emperor had the River p'Er diverted so that it ran through
the subdungeon. Then, for his loyalty, the Emperor elevated the commander to the
rank of Viceroy and bestowed the palace upon him and his heirs in perpetuity.
Trobar p'Arvellhion knew that he had no such royal powers, but he indulged
himself for some little time in fantasies of what would happen if such powers
were his.

There were fifty of them being outprocessed today from this particular prison
compound. They walked out through metal fences, between rows of slitwire, past
guards who held their silver slug-guns high. Each of the former prisoners wore a
new suit of black cloth that had been supplied from the personal treasury of the
Emperor. Already the suits were covered with a thin layer of red dust, the
relentless gift of the desert to each of them. Trobar wondered how the Emperor
Chankrondor IV had felt as he left his imprisonment. His eyes were caught by the
eyes of the prisoners still inside, who stood against the metal fence, dressed
in gray fatigues that were streaked with red. With their fingers caught in the
meshes of the fence, they looked hungrily at the fifty men who trooped quietly
to the waiting bus. They had worked hard all day out in the red waste. They
waited for the dinner call, but were riveted now by this sight of former
companions being taken to freedom.

Trobar could not look away from them even when he entered the bus. He found a
window seat, and kept his face pressed against the plastic as they drove away. A
few of the prisoners raised their arms to wave farewell, and Trobar waved back,
though he knew they could not see. He himself had pressed against that fence,
many times, watching the freedmen leaving, hoping that they were going Home as
someday he would go Home, fearing that they were not.

The bus drove out past the landing field where the transport ships waited. They