"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автора

in the past."
Karrde shook Booster's hand. "It's a good thing you're retired, Booster. I
wouldn't like having to split the galaxy between us. Please, don't leave quite
yet. I'd offer you my hospitality."
Booster smiled. "And you want to talk to Mirax about the lanvarok."
"Indeed," Karrde laughed, "it's a very good thing you're retired."
28
Iella drew her knees up to her chest and settled her arms around them, then
sighed. Diric would have found this place fascinating. Softly muted moonlight
glowed green through the room's skylight. It managed to make the spare room seem
warmer and more inviting, despite the lack of amenities.
Human amenities, she corrected herself. To the Vratix this would be next to
luxury.
The Vratix who still lived in harvester tribes were scat-tered over the face of
Thyferra, living in villages much akin to the one in which Iella and the Ashern
rebels had sought ref-uge. The buildings themselves were created out of an
air-dried, mud and saliva mixture that the Vratix slathered on a twig and branch
lattice. While not as strong or durable as fer-rocrete, the towers and tunnel
houses, if unmaintained, could still last as long as five years.
In the past, before the Vratix became civilized, the ele-mental dissolution of
their dwellings would force a migration to a new area, carefully allowing their
previous territory to recover from their habitation. Likewise, in the past, the
Vra-tix themselves had provided the saliva and had done the mix-ing to prepare
the mud. Now they used a domesticated
branch of a similar species, the knytix, to create the mud for Vratix masons.
The knytix, which resembled the Vratix- though smaller, blockier, and less
elegant in form-were kept as pets, as work animals, and Iella had heard, as food
for special occasions. When she had said she could never eat a pet, a Vratix had
explained that pets were offered as a gift to those the family wished to honor,
it became apparent that the level of their sacrifice showed the depth of their
respect for the individual to whom the offer was made. That certainly made the
practice more understandable, but she still couldn't imagine eating a creature a
young Vratix once called Fluffy or its Vratix equivalent.
Though eating knytix could have easily been seen as a primitive practice by a
barbaric society, the Vratix clearly were anything but. The Vratix village
consisted of several towers that rose up into the middle reaches of the gloan
trees. Concentric circular terraces with little walls at the lip gave each tower
the look of a stepped pyramid, though the rounded foundation made it more
elegant. Huge arching bridges connected one tower to another and were all but
hid-den by the thick forest foliage.
Vratix artistry was not limited to the architecture. The green skylight had been
made by a Vratix artisan who chewed various rain forest leaves into paste, then
fashioned it into a film thin enough to allow light to pass through. It appeared
delicate in the extreme, yet was strong enough to ward off rain and survive
other climatic conditions.
The stems and veins of the leaves formed a complex and chaotic network that
looked visually attractive, but Iella knew that was not its primary purpose.
Because both light and sound took time to travel to the eye and ear,
respectively, the Vratix considered them secondary and deceptive senses. What
one saw or heard was always something that had hap-pened in the past, but what