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

"What about Goshevan?"

"Goshevan!" I shouted. "Why do the young men always come asking about Goshevan?" The domestic came
and I embarrassed myself by shouting out an order for coffee and kvass. As it rolled away, I said,
"There are more stories told about Goshevan than dead stars in the Vild. What do you know about
Goshevan?"

"I know that he wanted what I want. He was a man with a dream who -- "

"He was a dreamer! Do you want to know about Goshevan? I'll tell you the story that I tell all the
young men who come to me seeking nightmares. Are you sitting comfortably? Then listen well..."

The domestic brought our drink bubbling in two of those huge, insulated pots that they blow on
Fostora. It clumsily poured the dark liquids into our delicate marble cups as I told the young man
the story of Goshevan:


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"There lived on Summerworld a young noble who took a greater interest in antiques and old books --
some say he had been to Ksandaria and bribed the librarians into selling him part of the Kyoto
collection of Old Earth -- than he did in managing his estates. He was an erudite man who claimed
that the proper study of man was man -- not how to produce five tons more coffee per cubage. One
day he tired of his life and said, 'My s-sons are weak-faced maggots who exist on the diseased
flesh of this rotten civilization. They p-plot with my wives against me and laugh as my wives
sleep with other men.' And so Goshevan sold his estates, freed his slaves, and told his family
they would have to make their living by the sweat of their hands and the inspiration of their
brains. He paid for a passage on a Darghinni long ship and made his way toward the Vild.

"Now everyone knows the Darghinni are tricksters and so is it any wonder they didn't warn him of
the laughing pools on Darkmoon? Well, warn him they didn't, and Goshevan spent two seasons on that
dim, lukewarm planet coughing at the lungmelt in his chest while the surgeons painstakingly cut
the spirulli from his muscles and waited and watched and cut some more.

"When he was well, he found a Fravashi trader who was willing to take him to Yarkona; on Yarkona
he shaved his head and wrapped his body in rags so that the harijan pilgrims he befriended there
would allow him a corner on one of their sluggish prayer ships in which to float. And so, gray of
hair and stinking of years of his own sweat and filth, he came to Neverness like any other seeker.

"Though it was late midwinter spring, and warm for that season, he was stunned by the cold and
dazzled by the brightness of our city. And so he paid too much money for snow goggles and the
finest of shagshay furs lined with silk belly. 'The streets are colored ice,' he said
disbelievingly, for the only ice he had ever seen had been brought to him in exotic drinks by his
slaves. And he marvelled at the purples and greens of the glissades and the laughing children who
chased each other up and down the orange and yellow glidderies on ice skates. The silvery spires
and towers were frozen with the ever present verglas of that season, scattering the white spring
light so that the whole city gleamed and sparkled in a most disconcerting manner. 'There is beauty
here,' he said. 'The false beauty of artifice and a civilization gone to rot.' And so, dressed in