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

He added wood to the fire in the big stone hearth and turned back the sheets of the huge four-poster
bed. He undressed, showered, then climbed into the period-piece bed and let his weary body sink
deeply into the eiderdown mattress.
He thought of Bettinger and Flynn, the other two jet-tractor pilots. Bettinger must have reached
Bimini by now, and seen the dark sea raging where once the android settlement and the fenced-off lake
had been. In a few more monthsтАФyears, if you computed the time objectively тАФ Flynn would arrive
here. Both would return with empty capsules.
Matthew sighed, and turned on his side.
There was nothing he could do. The Bimini base was no more, and that was all there was to it. He
thought fleetingly of the orbiting capsule and wondered why Zeus X had not wanted it brought down; but
the ways of God were by their very nature inscrutable, and not to be questioned, and presently Mathew
North ceased wondering, and slept.

A knock on his door delivered him up from a haunting dream of his lost youth. "Yes?" said Old Matt
North, sitting up in bed. 'What is it?"
"You have a visitor, Mr. North."
"A visitor? Who?"
There was awe in Faustina's voice. 'Hera Christopoulos. She's waiting for you downstairs. Hurry,
Mr. North!"
Fading footsteps. Silence once again.
For a while his consternation held him chained. Finally, breaking free, he climbed out of bed and
pulled his best suit out of his duffel gag. He got into it, trembling all the while, and wetted and combed his
gray and thinning hair. The dark stubble on his cheeks distressed him тАФ he should have shaved before
going to bed. Now it was too late.
Hera Christopoulos. The wife of Zeus IX ....
She was tall, and coldly beautiful. Her dark eyes were set beneath delicate black flares of brows, and
held in them a quality that was reminiscent of deep space. Her black hair, upswept into a twist that
flowered out and spilled down like the waters of a Cimmerian fountain, stole microcosmic stars from the
hearth-fire before which she statuesquely stood. A scarlet sarong, secured by a silver chain around her
throat, swirled thrice around her Junoesque body and terminated in a silver band just above her right
knee.
She had unfastened the throat-clasp that had held her ermine cloak in place, and the cloak had fallen
to the flagstone floor like snow, half-burying her sandaled feet, and she stood in the snow haughtily, the
firelight heightening the insolence of her naked arms and shoulders and her semi-naked legs.
Entering the room, Matthew thought for a moment that he had seen her before. The absurd thought
was followed instantly by the memory which explained it. Oftentimes descendants duplicated the physical
traits of a long-dead ancestor. Here was a case in point. It was not Hera whom he had seen, but Dione
Christopoulos the wife of Zeus IV, and Hera's great-great grandmother.
The memory, once unleashed, ran rampant in his mind. Once again the long-ago night closed in
around him тАФ the night and the wine and the laughter, the girls and the synthetic gin. Once again he was
forty-five and afraid. Once again the strange restlessness came over him, and suddenly the intervening
years were no more and he was plunging out of the stifling Haven bar and into the wind-washed street.
The coldness of the night shocked him, but he did not go back inside for his greatcoat. He welcomed
the coldness. He reveled in it, and he let the icy wind wash over him as though he were a boulder lodged
in midstream, delighting in the clean, clear current. Saturn was on high, a great and gleaming jewel
hanging in the heavens, bathing the ice-flats in bluish light and imparting to the House of Christopoulos a
majesty which the daylight would destroy.
Something about the storied structure tied in with his restlessness. He set off across the flats, into the
river of the wind.