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

he stood up and followed behind me, smoothing out the dents with the
balls of his black-slippered feet. "You've no respect for art," he said
as he put on his skates. He fastened his black shagshay fur cape around
his neck with a gold chain and opened the door. "Barbarian!" he said,
and we skated out onto the street.

We sped between Resa's Morning Towers tucked low and tight with our arms
swinging and our skates clacking mechanically against the smooth red
ice. The cold wind against my face felt good. In no time at all we shot
past the granite and basalt towers of the high professionals' college,
Upplysa, and passed through the marble pillars of the west gate of the
Academy, and there she was.

She shimmers, my city, she shimmers. She is said to be the most
beautiful of all the cities of the Civilized Worlds, more beautiful even
than Parpallaix or the cathedral cities of Vesper. To the west, pushing
into the green sea like a huge, jewel-studded sleeve of city, the
fragile obsidian cloisters and hospices of the Farsider's Quarter
gleamed like black glass mirrors. Straight ahead as we skated, I saw the
frothy churn of the Sound and the whitecaps of breakers crashing against
the cliffs of North Beach. and above the entire city, veined with purple
and glazed with snow and ice, Urkel and Attakel rose up like vast
pyramids against the sky. Beneath the half-ring of extinct volcanoes
(Urkel, I should mention, is the southernmost peak and though less
magnificent than the others, it has a conical symmetry that some find
pleasing) the towers and spires of the Academy scattered the dazzling
false winter light so that the whole of the Old City sparkled. The
streets, as everyone knows, are colored ice. Throughout the city, the
white shimmer is broken by strands of orange and green and blue.

"Strange are the streets of the City of Pain," the Timekeeper is fond of
quoting, but though indeed colorful and strange, they are colorful and
strange to a purpose. The streets-the glissades and slidderies-have no
names. Thus it has been since our first Timekeeper announced that young
novices could prepare their brains for the pathways of the manifold by


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memorizing the pathways of our city. Since he understood that our city
would grow and change, he devised a plan whereby returning pilots who
had been away too long might still be able to negotiate the ice and not
lose their way. The plan is supposed to be simple. There are two main
streets: the Run, colored blue, which twists from West Beach across the
long sleeve of the peninsula where it meets the foothills of Attakel and
Urkel, and the Way, which is laid straight from the Hollow Fields to the
Sound. Any orange sliddery intersects-eventually-the Way. Any green
glissade intersects the Run. The glidderies, colored purple, join with
glissades, and the red lesser glidderies give out onto the slidderies. I