"Diane Duane - Feline Wizards 2 - Majesty's Wizardly Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

The train pulled up in front of him, stopped and chimed: the doors
opened, and people emptied out in a rush of briefcases and schoolbags
going by, and here and there a few white uniforms showing from under
jackets and coats -- people heading to the hospital in town. Patel
got on the last car, which would be the first one out, and sat in
what would have been the driver's seat, if there had been a driver:
there was none. These trains were handled by a trio of
straightforwardly-programmed PCs based somewhere in the Canary Wharf
complex. The innovation left the first seats in the front car open,
and gave the lucky passenger a beautiful view of the ride into town.

Patel, though, had seen it all a hundred times, and paid little
attention until the train swung round the big curve near South Quay
and headed across the water. There was something about the quality of
the rail sound that changed there, probably to do with the way the
water reflected it, and the increased noise level caught his
attention. He gazed up briefly at the massive blue-sheened glass-clad
tower of One Canada Place, what most people called "the Canary Wharf
tower", with its distinctive pyramidal top and the brilliant white
double strobe flashing at the peak of the pyramid, then glanced down
again at the building site just across the water from the tower and
underneath the train, the new buildings rising on Heron Quays. Even
though he knew a little about the place's history, Patel found it
hard to imagine this landscape, not full of construction gear and
scaffolding, but jostling with the hulls of close-berthed ships, the
air black with smoke from a thousand smokestacks, cranes loading and
unloading goods: the shipping of an empire filling these man-made
harbors and lagoons that had been dredged out of oxbows of the
Thames. It had all vanished a long time ago, when Britain stopped
being an empire and the mistress of the seas. This whole area had
undergone a terrible decline after the war, during which it had been
bombed nearly flat, and whatever was left had fallen into decrepitude
or ruin. Now it was growing again, office space abruptly mushrooming
on the waterside sites where the ships had docked to disgorge their
cargoes. Only the street names, and the names of the Docklands
stations, preserved the nautical memories: some of the old loading
cranes still stood ... but the warehouses behind them had been
converted to expensive loft apartments. Slim black cormorants fished
off Heron Quays, though the quays themselves were gone, slowly being
replaced by more apartments and office space: and shining hotels and
still more office buildings looked down on waters which were no
longer so polluted that it would catch fire if you dropped a match in
them.

The train pulled out of Canary Wharf station and headed northwestward
away from the towers toward humbler real estate, the "less
fortunate" parts of East London which had yet to benefit from the
real estate boom in the Docklands. The names of the DLR stations grew
less nautical, older: Limehouse, Shadwell ... Patel got out at