"Mark S. Geston - The Allies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

after Paris was leveled. Such a thing would have been a memory to Philip the
Fair.

East Africa was easily conquered; after the pandemics of the decade before the
war there was hardly anyone left there but miners anyway. We saw the miracles
there too. The weather stabilized and the rains came back to the veldt, but that
might have had nothing to do with the enemy. The herds of wildebeest and impala
returned with the long grasses. Lions and cheetahs and other predators unseen
for fifty years reappeared in numbers that suggested they had only been hiding
instead of having been on the edge of extinction, as everyone had thought.

Laser spectrometry from the low orbit satellites showed that water from the
Rhine was clean enough to drink six years after Germany and France were crushed.
The Amazon was even more quickly thronged with white dolphins after the fall of
Brazil.

The oceans under their control were similarly cleansed. Moles and jetties were
scoured from the rims of harbors. The ships left behind were taken apart at
night and reduced to elemental forms we had no way of detecting. The whales
returned in profusion and our submarines reported hearing scornful choruses from
newly reconstituted pods rolling through the Pillars of Hercules and up the
Sunda Strait into the Java Sea.

They built only a few installations and enigmatic structures that might have
been garrison towns for themselves. There were never any embassies or responses
to our demands for negotiation. The ultimatum that they issued upon their first
landing was repeated regularly; it never changed in tone or wording. Throughout
the years of conflict, it was the only thing they ever said to us.

We knew by the tenth year we could not beat them, and by the fifteenth the best
informed people were privately saying they would win. They would pursue their
implacable strategy until there were no more people left, but then the rest of
the world would blossom in a way that we had never been rich enough to afford.

Great care was taken to understand what was going on in the occupied
territories: how many extinctions were averted, how many rare species suddenly
brought back to Edenic plenitude, how many thousands of square kilometers of
forest reclaimed, dams removed, highways tom up and the ground resown, cities
leveled and the places where all the people had been murdered turned into
gardens. What was similarly noticed but much less talked about was how
impoverished our remaining lands became. What few animals remained with us
either sickened and died or just vanished when we were not looking. Either that,
or they were the targets of rage and frustration and were the subject of
eradication campaigns. Thus, the pigeons and starlings were erased from New York
before its siege and all the squirrels in Boston were killed in one July. After
the fifteenth year, it seemed like the only animals left were those held captive
in zoos or the few anachronistic farms that depended on such things.
"When was the last time I saw a bird?" my father asked me shortly before he
died. "Just a crow or a seagull? When? A year? Five? Is that possible?" He was
not looking at rise, but all around at the sky, as if he had misplaced these