"Gene Wolfe - Long Sun 3 - Calde Of The Long Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

CALDE OF THE LONG SUN
by Gene Wolfe




Chapter 1 -- The Slaves of Scylla


As unruffled by the disturbances shaking the city as by the furious
thunderstorm that threatened with every gust to throw down its
shiprock and return its mud brick to the parent mud, His Cognizance
Patera Quetzal, Prolocutor of the Chapter of This Our Holy
City of Viron, studied his present sere and sallow features in the
polished belly of the silver teapot.
As at this hour each day, he swung his head to the right and
contemplated his nearly noseless profile, made a similar inspection
of its obverse, and elevated his chin to display a lengthy and
notably
wrinkled neck. He had shaped and colored face and neck with care
upon arising, as he did every morning; nevertheless, there remained
the possibility (however remote) that something had gone awry by
ten: thus the present amused but painstaking self-examination.
"For I am a careful man," he muttered, pretending to smooth one
thin white eyebrow.
A crash of thunder shook the Prolocutor's Palace to its
foundations at the final word, brightening every light in the room to
a
glare; rain and hail drummed the windowpanes.
Patera Remora, Coadjutor of the Chapter, nodded solemnly.
"Yes indeed, Your Cognizance. You are indeed a most--ah--advertent
man."
Yet there was always that possibility. "I'm growing old, Patera.
Even we careful men grow old."
Remora nodded again, his long bony face expressive of regret.
"Alas, Your Cognizance."
"As do many other things, Patera. Our city... The whorl itself
grows old. When we're young, we notice things that are young, like
ourselves. New grass on old graves. New leaves on old trees."
Quetzal lifted his chin again to study his bulging reflection through
hooded eyes.
"The golden season of beauty and--um--elegiacs, Your Cognizance."
Remora's fingers toyed with a dainty sandwich.
"As we notice the signs of advancing age in ourselves, we see
them
in the whorl. Just a few chems today who ever saw a man who saw a
man who remembered the day Pas made the whorl."
A little bewildered by the rapid riffle through so many
generations,
Remora nodded again. "Indeed, Your Cognizance. Indeed