"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автораin 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. 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 |
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