"Robert F. Young - In Saturn's Rings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

And saw the bonesтАФ
The grisly bones, picked clean of living flesh. The white bones that almost matched the marble basin.
Femurs, pelvis; empty rib box. Dark-socketed skull. Bone-fingers, one of them still encircled by a ring тАФ
a ring that bore a familiar seal.
The seal of the House of Christopoulos.
Or, if you looked at it with Aeschylus' eyes, the seal of the House of Atreus ....
Sickened, Matthew turned away. "When?" he forced himself to ask.
Aeschylus faced him. As the android spoke, his blink-rate rapidly increased:

This morning, darkly plotting deep within,
The monarch sleeping softly by her side,
She rose, and did with goblet vile
Scoop death from waters rampant and carry it aloft,
And pour it into this, her monarch's pool.

The old "man" paused. Raising his eyes to the counterfeit countryside and lifting his arms in
supplication, he went on:

Come, Eumenides three, and haunt her. Dog her bloody trail!
To Apollo and Athena make her flee. Come, do not waitтАФ
Orestes is no more; Electra lurks not at this sorry bier.
Beyond the cloud-cast sky where once dimly shone the sun.
Only darkness can be seen. Woe unto her тАФ woe!
Awake, ye fiends incarnate, and right this crime
The indifferent gods looked down but did not see!

Horrified, Matthew seized the keys which the old "man" still held in his hand, and ran from the room.
He sorted through them as he hurried down the mezzanine, and by the time he reached the door to
Hera's bedchamber he had the one he wanted.
He fitted it into the lock, and turned it. Then he tried the door. It did not give.
He went loking for a visiphone.

VI

The Saturnia police had to knock out the Alexander the Great and his three generals with a
deactivation ray to gain entry.
Matthew did not know this till he left the House hours later and saw the four "bodies" sprawled on
the marble steps. Instinctively, he looked away. They brought too vividly to mind the "body" he had
found by the piranha-infested pool when he had returned to the bath with the Saturnia Inspector of
Police. Alexander, Ptolemy, Seleucus and Antigonus could he re-activated. Aeschylus could not he.
Aeschylus had gone insane; his circuits had shorted out, blowing his eye-tubes, and all that remained of
him now was a blackened shell.
Perhaps, though, it was just as well. Now that the House of Christopoulos had fallen, there was no
more need for period-piece androids.
Nor for period-piece spacemen.
Old Matt North shivered in the raw wind that was rushing across the flats. He turned up the collar of
his greatcoat, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. Dawn was beginning to edge into the sky, and
Saturn had long since crept to rest. He wondered what it would be like, living in a world that had left him
over four centuries behind. He could not possibly adapt himself to it. He was too old. Too tiredтАФ
A tired old man.