"Vance, Jack - Gaean Reach - Demon Princes 01 - The Star Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

mine and I intend it to be permanent."

Q: So then they desist?

A: Usually.

Q: And if not?

A: I pitch them into the sea.

Smade was a reticent man. His origins and early life were known
only to himself. In the year 1479 he acquired a cargo of fine timber,
which, for a whole set of obscure reasons, he took to a small stony
world in the middle Beyond. And there, with the help of ten in-
dentured artisans and as many slaves, he built Smade's Tavern.

The site was a long narrow shelf of heath between the Smade
Mountains and Sinade Ocean, precisely on the planet's equator. He
built to a plan as old as construction itself, using stone for the walls,
timber beams and plates of schist for the roof. Completed, the tav-
ern clung to the landscape, as integral as an outcrop of rock: a long
two-storied structure with a high gable, a double row of windows
in front and rear, chimneys at either end venting smoke from fires
of fossil moss. At the rear stood a group of cypress trees, their shape
and foliage completely appropriate to the landscape.

Smade introduced other new features into the ecology: in a
sheltered valley behind the tavern he planted fodder and garden
truck; in another he kept a small herd of cattle and a flock of poul-
try. All did moderately well, but showed no disposition to overrun
the planet.

Smade's dominion extended as far as he cared to claim-there
was no other habitation on the planet-but he chose to assert con-
trol only over an area of perhaps three acres, within the bounds of
a whitewashed stone fence. From occurrences beyond the fence
Smade held aloof, unless he had reason to consider his own interests
threatened-a contingency which had never arisen.

Smade's Planet was the single companion of Smade's Star, an

THE STAR KING

undistinguished white dwarf in a relatively empty region of space.
The native flora was sparse: lichen, moss, primitive vines and pal-
odendron, pelagic algae which tinctured the sea black. The fauna
was even simpler: white worms in the seabottom muck; a few ge-
latinous creatures which gathered and ingested the black algae in a
ludicrously inept fashion; an assortment of simple protozoa.
Smade's alterations of the planet's ecology could hardly, therefore,