"Ballard, J G - Cloud Scultors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)

Ever play Max Ernst games by staring up at that tent of blue
we prisoners call the sky? if so, I think you will appreciate this
story. If not, you can always do it over again yourself by
regarding Up. it takes a true architect of the nervous system
and the environment, however, to not only play this game,
but to play it well. 1. G. Bollard, I submit, is one of the
greatest cloud-sculptors I have ever witnessed in action.
So put on the appropriate piece by Debussy, and bear in
mind that despite Cervantes, last year's clouds are not so
useless as they may seem. No.
I chose to open the volume with this story, to set the
Magritte-mood of reality twice removed and, perhaps because
of this, twice as real. I'll double-cross you later on, I promise,
but for an opener, let's start with a piece that only Mister
Ballard could have written.

THE CLOUD-SCULPTORS OF CORAL D

J. G. Ballard

All summer the cloud-sculptors would come from Vermilion
Sands and sail their painted gliders above the coral towers
that rose like white pagodas beside the highway to Lagoon
West. The tallest of the towers was Coral D, and here the
rising air above the sand-reefs was topped by swan-like
clumps of fair-weather cumulus. Lifted on. the shoulders of
the air above the crown of Coral D, we would carve sea-
horses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film-
stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from
their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weep-
ing from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the
desert floor towards the sun.
Of all the cloud-sculptures we were to carve, the strangest
were the portraits of Leonora Chanel. As I look back to that
afternoon last summer when she first came in her white
limousine to watch the cloud-sculptors of Coral D, I kno"
we barely realised how seriously this beautiful but insaii
woman, regarded the sculptures floating above her in thi
calm sky. Later her portraits, carved in the whirlwind, wei
to weep their storm-rain upon the corpses of their sculptor;

I had arrived in Vermilion Sands three months earlier. A
retired pilot, I was painfully coming to terms with a broken
leg and the prospect of never flying again. Driving into the
desert one day, I stopped near the coral towers on the high-
way to Lagoon West. As I gazed at these immense pagodas
rtranded on the floor of this fossil sea, I heard music coming
from a sand-reef two hundred yards away. Swinging on my
crutches across the sliding sand, I found a shallow basin