Resnick, Mike - The 43 Antarean Dynasties

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 32.09KB 9 页 5.9玖币

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/Mike%20Resnick%20-%20The%2043%20Antarean%20Dynasties.txt

THE 43 ANTAREAN DYNASTIES

by Mike Resnick

_To thank the Maker Of All Things for the birth of his first male offspring, the

Emperor Maloth IV ordered his architects to build a temple that would forever

dwarf all other buildings on the planet. It was to be made entirely of crystal,

and the spire- covered roof, which looked like a million glistening spear-points

aimed at the sun, would be supported by 217 columns, to honor his 217 forebears.

When struck, each column would sound a musical note that could be heard for

kilometers, calling the faithful to prayer._

_The structure would be known as the Temple of the Honored Sun, for his heir had

been born exactly at midday, when the sun was highest in the sky. The temple

took 27 Standard years to complete, and although races from all across the

galaxy would come to Antares III to marvel at it, Maloth further decreed that no

aliens or non-believers would ever be allowed to enter it and desecrate its

sacred corridors with their presence..._

A man, a woman, and a child emerge from the Temple of the Honored Sun. The woman

holds a camera to her eye, capturing the same image from a dozen unimaginative

angles. The child, his lip sparsely covered with hair that is supposed to imply

maturity, never sees beyond the game he is playing on his pocket computer. The

man looks around to make sure no one is watching him, grinds out a smokeless

cigar beneath his heel, and then increases his pace until he joins them.

They approach me, and I will myself to become one with my surroundings, to

insinuate myself into the marble walls and stone walkways before they can speak

to me.

_I am invisible. You cannot see me. You will pass me by._

"Hey, fella -- we're looking for a guide," says the man. "You interested?"

I stifle a sigh and bow deeply. "I am honored," I say, glad that they do not

understand the subtleties of Antarean inflection.

"Wow!" exclaims the woman, aiming her camera at me. "I never saw anything like

that! It's almost as if you folded your torso in half! Can you do it again?"

I am reminded of an ancient legend, possibly aprocryphal though I choose to

believe it. An ambassador who was equally fascinated by the way the Antarean

body is jointed, once asked Komarith I, the founder of the 38th Dynasty, to bow

a second time. Komarith merely stared at him without moving until the

embarrassed ambassador slunk away. He went on to rule for 29 years and was never

known to bow again.

It has been a long time since Komarith, almost seven millennia now, and Antares

and the universe have changed. I bow for the woman while she snaps her

holographs.

"What's your name?" asks the man.

"You could not pronounce it," I reply. "When I conduct members of your race, I

choose the name Hermes."

"Herman, eh?"

"Hermes," I correct him.

"Right. Herman."

The boy finally looks up. "He said Hermes, Dad."

The man shrugs. "Whatever." He looks at his timepiece. "Well, let's get

started."

"Yeah," chimes in the child. "They're piping in the game from Roosevelt III this

afternoon. I've got to get back for it."

"You can watch sports anytime," says the woman. "This may be your only chance to

see Antares."

"I should be so lucky," he mutters, returning his attention to his computer.

I recite my introductory speech almost by rote. "Allow me to welcome you to

Antares III, and to its capital city of Kalimetra, known throughout the galaxy

as the City of a Million Spires."

"I didn't see any million spires when we took the shuttle in from the

spaceport," says the child, whom I could have sworn was not listening. "A

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/De...nick%20-%20The%2043%20Antarean%20Dynasties.txt (1 of 9) [2/24/2004 10:57:16 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Resnick, Mike - The 43 Antarean Dynasties.pdf

共9页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Resnick, Mike - The 43 Antarean Dynasties

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: