"Jack Vance - Marune v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

First Printing: September, 1975

Cover art by Darrell Sweet

Printed in the United States of America

BALLANTINE BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc.
201 East 50th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022
Simultaneously published by
Ballantine Books, Ltd., Toronto, Canada



Alastor Cluster, a node of thirty thousand live stars, uncounted dead hulks,
and vast quantities of interstellar detritus, clung to the inner rim of the
galaxy with the Unfortunate Waste before, the Nonestic Gulf beyond and the
Gaean Reach a sparkling haze to the side. For the spacetraveler, no matter
which his angle of approach, a remarkable spectacle was presented:
constellations blazing white, blue, and red; curtains of luminous stuff,
broken here, obscured there, by black storms of dust; starstreams wandering
in and out; whorls and spatters of phosphorescent gas.

Should Alastor Cluster be considered a segment of the Gaean Reach? The folk
of the Cluster, some four or five trillion of them on more than three
thousand worlds, seldom reflected upon the matter, and indeed considered
themselves neither Gaean nor Alastrid. The, typical inhabitant, when asked
as to his origin, might perhaps cite his native world or, more usually, his
local district, as if this place were so extraordinary, so special and
widely famed that its reputation hung on every tongue of the galaxy.

Parochialism dissolved before the glory of the Connatic, who ruled Alastor
Cluster from his palace on the world Numenes. The current Connatic, Oman
Ursht, sixteenth of the Idite dynasty, often pondered the quirk of fate
which had appointed him to his singular condition, only to smile at his own
irrationality: no matter who occupied the position, that person would frame
for himself the same marveling question.

The inhabited planets of the Cluster had little in common except their lack
of uniformity. They were large and small, dank and dry, benign and perilous,
populous and empty: no two alike. Some manifested tall mountains, blue seas,
bright skies; on others clouds hung forever above the moors, and no variety
existed except the alternation of night and day. Such a world, in fact, was
Bruse-Tansel, Alastor 1142, with a population of two hundred thousand,
settled for the most part in the neighborhood of Lake Vain, where they
worked principally at the dyeing of fabrics. Four spaceports served
Bruse-Tansel, the most important being that facility located at Carfaunge.