|
What had caused the people of the crystal city to perish And why had theirremains disappeared so completely that not even their bones were left ROOM WITH VIEW BY ROBERT F. YOUNG THE PLANET was a shining sphere of crystalline cause and effect. It was the sound of glasschimes in a summer wind captured and set to architecture. It was the only child of a lonely star and itwas moonless. It was also dead. Donant didnt know how long hed been walking. An hour perhaps. Maybe longer. There was atimelessness about the eternal streets and the endless edifices and hed left his watch in the shipremembering only his compass. But the compass was by far the more important item: with its needlenever deviating from the magnetic lode in the ships heart he could never get lost—not even in a city thatcovered an entire planet. Not even in a dead city. Donant was a cartographer and much of his life had been spent in the unexplored sectors of thegalaxy where civilizations were rare and cities even rarer. Nevertheless he was used to cities. He knewthe Cities of the Plane intimately—the metropolises of Mars and Venus and the collective edifices ofEarth. But he was used to cities with limited boundaries not cities that covered whole land masses andlinked crystalline arms across seas. Moreover he was used to cities with people in them. He came presently to a structure more striking than the others. Like them it was constructed of acrystallike material and seemed to have been cast from a single gigantic mold but there was a qualityabout it that set it aside. Gazing up at the prismatic facade Donant got the impression that the long deadarchitect
|
本帖子中包含更多资源
您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看,没有帐号?立即注册
x
|