"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Merchant Prince" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

runs thus: If the history books have me dying in my beloved Mortlake in 1608, and they are not mistaken in
their recordings, that implies that I managed to return from this accursed place and time to mine own genteel
and civilized world. Just the contemplation of my death being in the past fills me with such disquiet that I do
not permit myself to contemplate it, for fear that specific knowledge of what no man may know will serve to fix
me in this place, or bring about such an enormity that all the laws of Nature will stand affronted.
Yet I am dedicated to learning, to knowledge, to discovering the great arcana of Nature, and through these
devices, I seek to make my way back to the place I belong without wreaking any havoc on this time greater
than has been done already.
I wonder how I shall.
Extract from the Day Booke of John Dee, Doctor,
Dated this day, 25th January in the Year of Our Lord 2100
Chapter
1
AT FIRST IT HAD
been nothing but a whisper, more vapoury lies on the Omninet: The legendary Royal Newton had been
overthrown, defeated by a mysterious stranger who had assumed his role.
The rumours percolated onto the news groups and trickled onto the back pages of the tabloids as gossip
column fodder before duly shifting onto the front pages and becoming news. By then, of course, the story had
fractured into a dozen versions, all of them тАЬexclusiveтАЭ and from тАЬsources close to the Newton family.тАЭ
Royal Newton, the richest man in the world, was dead; no, he was in a mental hospital; no, he was living in
penury in the devastated remains of Paris or New Rome or London; no, he had been incarcerated in one of
the satellite prison cubes that occasionally fell out of their orbits; no, he had killed himself; he had been
overthrown in a palace coup; he had given away his fortune and become a monk; he had changed sex and
become a nun; he had joined a troupe of neo-hippies and was living in Alaska, tending the caribou; he had
been seen at the helm of an outward-bound colony shipтАжthe variations became more exorbitant and fabulous
with every passing hour.
And none of the stories, no matter how outrageous, came remotely close to the truth.
Royal Newton had been overthrown and ruined by Doctor John Dee, a five-hundred-year-old mathematician,
rogue, and astrologer from the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Dee, who had seen how such things were done,
had modeled himself on the merchant princes of his day and achieved what no one else had been able to.
Lee Vantis, however, was one of the handful of people in the world who knew that Royal Newton had not been
killed and was still aliveтАФafter a fashion. The electrician had been on call the day Newton had taken his heart
attack, his plastic and metal artificial heart actually exploding within his chest. Paradoxically, even though
NewtonтАЩs artificial lungs had been shredded by the shards of chrome and Teflon, the heartтАЩs backup power
cell had kept his blood circulating long enough for the doctors to hook him up to an artificial lung. The
intricate Union demarcation rules on the Moonbase had dictated that an electrician had to handle the heart,
and Vantis had been called in to remove the sparking and crackling artificial heart unit from NewtonтАЩs chest.
The myriad monitors and tubes draped from the manтАЩs body were proof enough that the richest man in the
world was still alive.
Vantis had seen Newton twice in the weeks since the accident. Once when he had been back to the
emergency ward to repair a faulty bed which insisted on folding itself shut at twelve noon every dayтАФwhether
it was occupied or notтАФand on another occasion to reduce the pressure on the sliding doors which either
closed with agonising slowness or snapped shut like the jaws of some rabid animal. On both occasions
Vantis had been unable to find anything wrong with either piece of equipment and was beginning to suspect
that the new religious movement which preached that God was in the machines might have something going
for them.
However, on each occasion he had seen the small, dark man at NewtonтАЩs bed. VantisтАЩs attention had been
drawn to the man because he seemed to be deep in conversation with the unconscious Newton. The small
man paced alongside the bed, arms flailing wildly, fingers darting, dark eyes wild and bright.
Vantis asked around and eventually the rumours began to trickle back. Nothing remained truly secret on the