Natural State
- Автор: Найт Дэймон
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Natural State». Краткое содержание книги:
The Regulars set up a ragged yell and came running forward. The two Muckfeet on either side of Alvah, Artie and the bucktoothed one called Lafe, dipped heaping dark-brown handfuls out of the bags they carried slung from their shoulders. Alvah followed suit, and recognized the stuff at last―bran meal, soaked in some fragrant syrup until it was mucilaginous and heavy.
Artie swung first, then Lafe, and Alvah last―and the soggy lumps smacked the foremost faces. The squad broke, wiping frenziedly. But you couldn’t wipe the stuff off. It clung coldly and grainily to the hair on the backs of your hands and your eyelashes and the nap of your clothing. All you could do was move it around.
One berserker with a smeared face didn’t stop, and Lafe dropped him with a knobkerrie between the eyes. One more, a white-faced youth, stood miraculously untouched, still hefting his club. He took a stride forward menacingly.
Grinning, Artie raised another glob of the mash and ate it, smacking his lips. The youth spun around, walked drunkenly to the nearest wall and was rackingly sick.
AN hour later, Knickerbocker Circle in Over Manhattan was littered with ameba-shaped puddles of clear plastic. Overhead, the stuff was hanging in festoons from the reticulated framework of the Roof and, for the first time in a century, an unfiltered wind was blowing into New York. Halfway up the sheer facade of the Old Movie House, the roc that had brought Alvah from Jersey was flapping along, a wingtip almost brushing the louvers, while its rider sprinkled pale dust from a sack. Farther down the street, a sickly green growth was already visible on cornices and window frames.
The antique neon sign of the Old Movie dipped suddenly, its supports softened visibly. It swung, nodded and crashed to the pavement.
Three hours later, a little group of whey-faced men in official dress was being loaded aboard a freight roc opposite the underpass to the Cauldwell Floatway in Over Bronnix. Alvah thought he saw McArdle among them, but he couldn’t be sure.
Twilight―all the streets that radiated from the heart of the City were afloat with long, slowly surging tides of humanity, dim in the weak glow from the lumen globes plastered haphazardly to the flanks of the buildings. At the end of every street, the Wall was crumbled down and the moat filled, its fire long gone out. And down the new railed walkways from all three levels came the men, women and children, stumbling out into the alien lumenlit night and the strange scents and the wide world.
Watching from the hilltop with his arm around his wife’s waist, Alvah saw them being herded into groups and led away, unprotesting―saw them in the wains, rolling off toward the temporary shelters where, likely as not, they would sleep the night through, too numbed to be afraid of the morrow.
In the morning, their teaching would begin.
Babylon, Alvah thought, Thebes, Angkor, Lagash, Agade, Tyre, Luxor, and now New York.
A City grew out and then in―it was always the way, whether or not it had a Barrier around it.
Growing, it crippled itself and its people―and died. The weeds overgrew its felled stones.
“Like an egg,” B. J. said, although he had not spoken. “Omne ex ovum―but the eggshell has to break.”
“I know,” said Alvah, discovering that the empty ache in his belly was not sentiment but hunger. “Speaking of eggs―”
B. J. gave his arm a reassuring little pat. “Anything you want, dear. Radnip, orangoe, pearots, fleetmeat―you pick the menu.” Alvah’s mouth began to water.