"David Zindell - Neverness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

fall through the galaxy until the universe collapsed inward upon itself
and never find a denser thickspace.

How many billions of pathways converge around our cool yellow star no
one knows. There are probably an infinite number of them. The ancient
cantors, believing that their theorems proved the impossibility of an
infinite thickspace, had predicted that our pilots would never find the
topological nexus that they sought. So when our first Lord Pilot had
fallen out of the manifold above the small, cold, mountainous island
that was to shelter our beloved and doomed city, he named her Neverness,
in mockery of the nay-saying academicians. Of course to this day the
cantors call her the Unreal City, but few pay them much attention. I,
Mallory Ringess, whose duty it is to set forth here the history of the
golden age and great crisis of our Order, shall follow the tradition of
the pilots who came before me. Neverness-so I knew her as a child when I
entered the novitiate such a short time ago; Neverness I call her now;
Neverness she will always remain.

On the fourteenth day of false winter in the year 2929 since the
founding of Neverness, Leopold Soli, my uncle and Lord Pilot of our
Order, returned to our city after a journey lasting twenty-five
years-four years longer than I had been alive. Many pilots, my mother
and Aunt Justine among them, had thought him dead, lost in the inky
veils of the manifold or perhaps incinerated by the exploding stars of
the Vild. But he, the famous Lord Pilot, had fooled everyone. It was the
talk of the city for eighty days. As false winter hardened and the light
snows deepened, I heard it everywhere whispered, in the cafes and bars
of the Farsider's Quarter as well as the towers of the Academy, that
there would be a quest. A quest For journeymen pilots such as we were
then-in a few more days we would take our pilot's vows-it was an
exciting time, and more a time of restlessness and excruciating
anticipation, Within each of us stirred a dreamlike but deeply felt


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intimation and fear that we would be called to do impossible things, and
soon. What follows, then, is a chronicle of the impossible, a story of
dreams and fears and pain.

At twilight of the evening before our convocation, my fat, lazy friend
Bardo and I devised a plan whereby we-I-could confront the Lord Pilot
before the next day's long, boring ceremony. It was the ninety-fourth of
false winter. Outside our dormitory rooms, a soft snow had recently
fallen, dusting the commons of the pilot's college with a veil of cold
white powder. Through our frosted windows, I saw the towers of Resa and
the other colleges gleaming in the light of the setting sun. "Why do you
always do what you're not supposed to do?" Bardo asked me as he stared
mournfully at me with his large brown eyes. I had often thought that the