（外文电子版资料）Martin, George R.R. - Dying of the Light.doc

PROLOGUE A rogue, an aimless wanderer, creations castaway; this world was all those things. For uncounted centuries it had been falling, alone, without purpose, falling through the cold lonely places between the suns. Generations of stars had succeeded each other in stately sweeps across its barren skies. It belonged to none of them. It was a world in and of itself, entire. In a sense it was not even part of the galaxy; its tumbling path cut through the galactic plane like a nail driven through a round wooden tabletop. It was part of nothing. And nothing was very close at hand. In the dawn of human history, the rogue world pierced a curtain of interstellar dust that covered a trifling small area near the up-edge of the galaxys great lens. A handful of stars lay beyond-thirty or so, a mere handful. Then emptiness, a night greater than any the wandering world had known. There, falling through that shadowed border region, it met the shattered people. The Earth Imperials found it first, at the height of their giddy, drunken expansion, when the Federal Empire of Old Earth was still trying to rule all the worlds of humanity across immense impossible gulfs. A warship named the Mao Tse-tung, crippled during a raid on the Hrangans, its crew dead at their stations, its engines alternately shifting into drive and out again, became the first ship of the manrealm to drift beyond the Tempters Veil. The Mao was a derelict, airless and full of grotesque corpses that bobbed aimlessly through its corridors and brushed against its bulkheads every century or so; but its computers still functioned, cycling blindly through their rituals, scanning well enough to note the nameless rogue planet on their charts when the ghost ship emerged from drive within a few light-minutes of it. Almost seven centuries later a trader out of Tober stumbled on the Mao Tse-tung, and that notation. By then it was no news; the world had been found again. Celia Marcyan was the second discoverer. Her Shad