"Simon Hawke - The Nine Lives of Catseye Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

miracle was that nobody freaked out and pushed the button, but then, they'd already trashed the world almost
to the point of oblivion and were probably desperate to save what little they had left. Saner minds prevailed,
though sanity was an extremely relative term in those days. (And in many ways, it still is, but that's another
story.)
The Collapse had plunged the world into a modern dark age, where the machinery all stopped and mankind's
feral instincts took over. It wasn't very pretty. And then something happened that no one had expected,
something that came from so far out of left field it took decades before the public consciousness could even
deal with it. Magic was reborn.
Actually, to be precise, it had never really died. It had simply been forgotten. What little history of magic use
remained had long since been relegated to myth and folklore. Even today, most people don't know what it's
really all about... and if they did, they'd lose their cookies.
Tom Malory set it all down in his book, The Wizard of Camelot, or most of it, anyway. There were certain
things he had held back, but only because he would have caused a panic if he'd told the whole truth and
nothing but. This isn't the original Tom Malory, you understand, the one who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, in which
he set down the legend of King Arthur for posterity. This was his namesake, and no relation, a guy who'd
been a soldier in the British army and an urban Strike Force cop in London during the Collapse. What
happened to that Malory has become widespread public knowledge. He wrote about it afterward and retired a
rich man, but for the record, he was right there, from the beginning, when magic came back into the world.
He'd moved his family out of London, to the countryside, where it was somewhat safer, but life was still no
picnic. They were living hand to mouth, just barely getting by, and his kids were freezing in the biting cold of
the English winter. No fuel available. There was some coal and there was wood, but it was a seller's market,
and Malory could not afford the going rate. What was the poor guy going to do, watch as his wife and kids
died of pneumonia? No, of course not. He did what any self-respecting man would do when caught in such a
situation. He went out to steal what he could.
Not far from where he lived, there was a small forest preserve, one of the few wooded areas left standing in
that defoliated world. It was surrounded by tall fencing and barbed wire, patrolled by well-armed guards, and
the grounds inside the enclosure had been mined. But Malory was a desperate man, and he'd had
commando training. He managed to break in, with an ax. The way he tells it, he wasn't really sane at the
time. He'd passed the breaking point. He didn't think that the most he could carry was a measly armload,
assuming he didn't get caught while he was chopping wood in a protected national preserve, and it was hardly
worth the risk. It certainly never occurred to him that what he'd done was about to change the world. He just
broke in there, desperate and feverish, and went a short ways in, so that he'd be out of sight of the perimeter,
and what he came across was the biggest grandaddy of an oak tree he had ever seen.
What happened after that is legend now. He looked at this huge tree, miraculously left standing after all those
years of people chopping down everything in sight, stared at it, at this leviathan that could keep his family
warm for months, maybe even years, and he just went crazy. He screamed and attacked it with his ax, but
all he ever got in was just that one first blow, because the moment the ax had struck the tree, a bolt of
lightning came down from the thunderclouds roiling overhead and split the oak right down the middle. And
standing there, right smack in the center of the split, was Merlin, the legendary wizard to King Arthur.
Turns out it wasn't a legend, after all. For two thousand some odd years, after the sorceress Morgan le Fay
had tricked him and entombed him in that living oak, protected by a spell, Merlin Ambrosius had slept in
some kind of enchanted, suspended animation, dreaming the events that took place in the world outside. It
wasn't Tom Malory who broke the spell; he just happened to be there when the enchantment ran its course
and Merlin was released. But he was there, at Merlin's side, when the Second Thaumaturgic Age began and
the world was dragged kicking and screaming out of the Collapse and into a magical new dawn.
All this happened many years before I was born, of course, and I wouldn't be the cat I am today if Merlin
hadn't brought back magic to the world and founded schools of thaumaturgy that would teach the old
forgotten arts to his new pupils. The twenty-third-century world of today has come a long way from the
Collapse. The union of magic and technology has brought about a kinder, gentler world in many ways.
Thaumaturgy is a nonpolluting resource, and so the air is clean now, even in the cities. Cracked and buckled