标题: 《The Rift 》作者：- Walter Jon Williams 【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2014-6-5 08:04 标题: 《The Rift 》作者：- Walter Jon Williams 【EPUB】 The Rift Walter J. Williams This work is dedicated to Willie Siros without whose information on the geology of the New Madrid Fault, given over lunch at a truck stop in Bastrop, this book would not exist. Lights of ships moved in the fairway — a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked omi-nously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. "And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth." —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness PROLOGUE LAST CHANT OF THE SUN MAN He was a god to his people. He lived high above the earth, in the realm of his brother the Sun, and his rule stretched from the world of life to the world of spirits. His word was absolute. Even the gods respected his desires. So why did the dogs disturb his dreams? It seemed unfair that he could not order them to stop their howling. The unearthly crying of dogs awakened the Sun Man before dawn. Leaving the slave Willow Girl asleep on the pallet beneath her buffalo robes, he dressed himself in the dark—a cape of bright bird feathers, a headdress of white swan feathers that ringed his head like the battlements of a tower, an apron of pierced whelk shells brought two thousand miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico—and then he picked up his boots and made his way out of the long house and into the still, cool predawn air. "How may I serve the Divine Sun, my husband?" said a voice. The Sun Man was startled, then annoyed. His wife, the Great Priestess, had a habit of turning up when she was neither wanted nor expected. Now she lay before him, stretched full on the