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

should not confuse matters by mentioning that there are two yellow
streets running through the Pilot's Quarter, but there are. No one knows
how they came to be there. A joke, no doubt, on our first Timekeeper.

We turned onto the Way at an orange and white checkered intersection
about a mile west of the Academy. The street was crowded with harijan
and wormrunners and other farsiders. We passed and bowed to the
eschatologists, cetics, akashics, horologes, the professionals and
academicians of our Order. (We did not come across any other pilots.

Although we pilots-some will deny this-are the very soul of our Order,
we are outnumbered by the scryers, holists, historians, remembrancers
and ecologists, by the programmers, neologicians and cantors. Our Order
is divided into one hundred and eighteen disciplines; there are too many
disciplines, more disciplines, it seems, every year.) There was
excitement in the air, as well as the alien scent of a couple of Friends
of Man, who had their trunks lifted as they talked to each other,
spraying out their foul speech molecules. Next to us skated an
expensively dressed Alaloi-or rather a man whose flesh had been sculpted
into the thick, powerful, hairy body of an Alaloi. This kind of
artificial return to the primitive form had been a fashion in the city
for years, ever since the famous Goshevan of Summerworld had tired of
his human flesh and had gone to live with the Alaloi in their caves on
the islands to the west of Neverness. The false-Alaloi, who was wearing
too much purple velvet and gold, pushed one of the slender, gentle
harijan out of his way and shouted, "Watch out, stupid farsider!" The
bewildered harijan stumbled, made a sign of peace across his shiny
forehead, and slunk off into the crowd like a beaten dog.

Bardo looked at me and shook his head sadly. He had always had a strange
empathy for the harijan and other homeless pilgrims who come to our city
seeking enlightenment. (And too often, they come seeking riches of a
more mundane nature.) He smiled as he edged closer to the barbaric
Alaloi. He insinuated his thick tree-trunk of a leg between the
purple-covered legs of the unsuspecting man. There was a ringing of
steel against steel, and steel grinding against ice, and suddenly the
man pitched forward to the street with a slap and a crack. Bardo
shouted, "Excuse me!" Then he laughed, reached back and grabbed my
forearm, and pulled me through the crush of skaters who were jostling
one another and vying for position in their hurry to reach their
favorite cafes or kiosks for their evening meal. I looked back through
the crowd, but I could not see the man whom Bardo had tripped. "On
Summerworld," Bardo said to me between gasps of air, "we brand dung like
him with red-hot steel."

We crossed into the Farsider's Quarter and came to the Street of the Ten
Thousand Bars. I have said that the streets of Neverness have no names,
but that is not entirely true. They have no official names, no names
that are marked on buildings or posted on street signs. Especially in
the Farsider's Quarter, there are many nameless streets that are named