"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

At the beginning we'd clutched each other, but as the battle progressed
we slowly drew apart, huddling into individual agony; the thing so big that
human warmth meant nothing, so frightening that the instinct to gather
together for protection was reversed, and the presence of others only
intensified the realization of how ultimately naked you were. Earlier we'd
set up a scattershield to filter the worst of the hard radiationтАФthe gamma
and intense infrared and ultravioletтАФblunt some of the heat and shock
and noise. We thought we had a fair chance of surviving, then, but we
couldn't have run anyway. We were fixed by the beauty of horror/horror of
beauty, surely as if by a spike driven through our backbones into the rock.

And away over the foothills, God danced in anger, and his feet struck
the ground to ash. What was it like?

Kos still has oceans and storms. Did y'ever watch the sea lashed by high
winds? The storm boils the water into froth, whips it white, until it
becomes an ocean of ragged lace to the horizon, whirlpools of milk, not a
fleck of blue left alive. The land looked like this at D'kotta. The hills moved.
The Quaestors had a discontinuity projector there, and under its lash the
ground stirred like sluggish batter under a baker's spoon; stirred,
shuddered, groaned, cracked, broke: acres heaved themselves into new
mountains, other acres collapsed into canyons.

Imagine a giant asleep just under the surface of the earth, overgrown
by fields, dreaming dreams of rock and crystal. Imagine him moving
restlessly, the long rhythm of his dreams touched by nightmare, tossing,
moaning, tremors signaling unease in waves up and down his miles-long
frame. Imagine him catapulted into waking terror, lurching suddenly to
his knees with the bawling roar of ten million burning calves: a steaming
claw of rock and black earth raking for the sky. Now, in a wink, imagine
the adjacent land hurtling downward, sinking like a rock in a pond,
opening a womb a thousand feet wide, swallowing everything and
grinding it to powder. Then, almost too quick to see, imagine the
mountain and the crater switching, the mountain collapsing all at once
and washing the feet of the older Blackfriars with a tidal wave of earth,
then tumbling down to make a pit; at the same time the sinking earth at
the bottom of the other crater reversing itself and erupting upward into a
quaking fist of rubble. Then they switch again, and keep switching. Like
watching the same film clip continuously run forward and backward. Now
multiply that by a million and spread it out so that all you can see to the
horizon is a stew of humping rock. D'y'visualize it? Not a tenth of it.
 Dervishes of fire stalked the chaos, melting into each other,
whirlpooling. Occasionally a tactical nuclear explosion would punch a hole
in the night, a brief intense flare that would be swallowed like a candle in
a murky snowstorm. Once a tacnuke detonation coincided with the
upthrusting of a rubble mountain, with an effect like that of a firecracker
exploding inside a swinging sack of grain.

The city itself was gone; we could no longer see a trace of anything
manmade, only the stone maelstrom. The river Delva had also vanished,