"Jack Vance - Alastor 2262 - Trullion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

and when the mood was on him, dug emeralds and opals from the mountain slopes, or gathered couch.
**He worked perhaps an hour each day, or occasionally as much as two or three; he spent
considerably more time musing on the verandah of his ramshackle house. He distrusted most
technical devices, finding them unsympathetic, confusing and-more important-expensive, though he
gingerly used a telephone the better to order his social activities, and took the pulsor of his
boat for granted.

* Merlank: a variety of lizard. The continent clasps the equator like a lizard clinging to a blue
glass orb.

** cauch: an aphrodisiac drug derived from the spore of a mountain mold and used by Trills to a
greater or lesser extent. Some retreated so far into erotic fantasy as to become irresponsible,
and thus the subject of mild ridicule. Irresponsibility, in the context of the Trill environment,
could hardly be accounted a critical social problem.


As in most bucolic societies, the Trill knew his precise place in the hierarchy of classes. At
the summit, almost a race apart, was the aristocracy; at the bottom were the nomad Trevany, a
group equally distinct. The Trill disdained unfamiliar or exotic ideas. Ordinarily calm and
gentle, he nonetheless, under sufficient provocation, demonstrated ferocious rages, and certain of
his customs-particularly the macabre ritual at the prutanshyy-were almost barbaric.

The government of Trallion was rudimentary and a matter in which the average Trill took little
interest. Merlank was divided into twenty prefectures, each administered by a few bureaus and a
small group of officials, who constituted a caste superior to the ordinary Trill but considerably
inferior to the aristocrats. Trade with the rest of the cluster was unimportant; on all Trill only
four space-ports existed; Port Gaw in the west of Merlank, Port Kerubian on the north coast, Port
Maheul on the south coast, and Vayamenda in the east.

A hundred miles east of Port Maheul was the market town Welgen, famous for its fine hussade
stadium. Beyond Welgen lay the Fens, a district of remarkable beauty. Thousands of waterways
divided this area into a myriad islands, some tracts of good dimension, some so small as to
support only a fisherman's cabin and a tree for the mooring of his boat.

Everywhere entrancing vistas merged one into another. Gray-green menas, silver-russet pomanders,
black jerdine stood in stately rows along the waterways, giving each island its distinctive
silhouette. Out upon their dilapidated verandahs sat the country folk, with jugs of homemade wine
at hand. Sometimes they played music, using concertinas, small round-bellied guitars, mouth-
calliopes that produced cheerful warbles and glisssndes. The light of the Fens were pale and
delicate, and shimmered with colors too transient and subtle for the eye to detect. In the morning
a mist obscured the distances; the sunsets were subdued pageants of lime-green and lavender.
Skiffs and runabouts slid along the water; occasionally an aristocrat's yacht glided past, or the
ferry that connected Welgen with the Fen villages.

In the dead center of the Fens, a few miles from the village of Saurkash, was Rabendary Island,
where lived Jut Hulden, his wife Marucha, and their three sons. Rabendary Island comprised about a
hundred acres, including a thirty-acre forest of mena, blackwood, candlenut, semprissima. To the
south spread the wide expanse of Ambal Broad. Farwan Water bounded Rabendary on the west, Gilweg
Water on the east, and along the north shore flowed the placid Saur River. At the western tip of