"Steve White - Emperor of Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

"The `People's Democratic Union,' " Corin supplied. "And it was four and a half standard centuries ago,
to be exact. But I was thinking of what happened after that. This was where Basil Castellan declared
himself Emperor."
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Her eyes widened. "You mean . . .the Basil Castellan? And his friends Sonja Rady and Torval
Bogdan?" Her eyes strayed to the planetscape of Santaclara. "Right here?"

He could understand her incredulous astonishment. The New Human rebellion against the old Solarian
Empire was a matter of dry history, but the trio she had named belonged to the realm of legend, beyond
any tedious fixity of time and place. He might as well have told her that Old King Cole had held court on
the planet beneath them, or that the Argonauts had sailed its seas.

"Right here," he affirmed. "They really did live, you knowтАФeven though they've been so mythologized by
now that it's hard to separate the facts from the fables. After he broke with Yoshi Medina, Castellan
established himself in former rebel space, where the people saw him as the hero who'd freed them from
the New Humans. He only reigned a little while, before he was defeated by treachery."

"Is it true," Janille asked, eyes still on the planet that had suddenly taken on a whole new aspect for her,
"that he and Rady disappeared afterwards? That their bodies were never found?"

"That's right. On the backwater worlds of these sectors, they still say that he never died, that he's in
cryogenic suspension somewhere, and will return when the people need him."

She laughed nervously. "Cryo suspension for four hundred years? I don't think so. Besides, it's for
damned sure he didn't come back to save the Empire from the Zyungen, or from the rabble of Beyonders
who followed them." She couldn't quite sustain her scornful tone to the end of her last sentence. "I
wonder," she resumed after a moment, as much to herself as to him, "what it was like to live in those
days?"

"You mean Castellan's lifetime and the generation or so after it? The age of romantic high adventure?"
Corin gave a short sound that held too little humor to be called a laugh. " `Adventure' has been defined as
somebodyelse having a horrible time hundreds of years ago or dozens of light-years away. It was an age
of nonstop civil war and murderous intrigueтАФjust the kind of age that makes for great historical fiction."
He gazed moodily through the transparent armorplast. "The real question is, what would Castellan think
ofour age?"

Somehow, he could feel her stiffen from across the few feet that separated them. "What do you mean?
There's only one way he could see it. Why, within our lifetimes, the Empire has finally been reunified. The
dream he gave his life for has come true!"

An idealist,Corin thought sadly.Like me, you grew up on the news stories of Armand Duschane's
reconquest . . . no, more like `triumphal march' after he'd established the only real power base in
Imperial space. And, like me, you went into the military to join the grand and glorious parade of
the Renewed Empire.

And, unlike me, you haven't just returned from the Ch'axanthu war. . . .