"Simon Hawke - Wizard 1 - The Wizard of 4th Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

THE WIZARD OF 4TH STREET by Simon
Hawke.

CHAPTER One
The cabdriver was a rookie; Wyrdrune could always tell. The photo on the license fastened to the dashboard showed
a dark young Puerto Rican with perfect teeth and pockmarked skin, wearing his brand-new yellow turban and smiling
into the camera lens. It identified the driver as Jesus Dominguez, Certified Adept, Class 4 Public Transport, New York
City Taxi and Limousine Commission. The lack of conversation was a dead giveaway. Wyrdrune glanced up at the
driver's face, reflected in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, his lips were moving, repeating the simple impulsion spells
over and over to himself. A veteran cabbie could easily maintain the relatively undemanding levitation and impulsion
spells while carrying on a nonstop conversation, but the rookies who had just passed their first-level adept exams were
always a little nervous at the start. Wyrdrune closed his eyes and thought, Please, lets not have an accident, okay?
Not today. Let's just get there on time and in one piece. There's too much riding on this.
He glanced out the window as the vaguely turtle-shaped cab skimmed silently along about two feet above the surface
of the disintegrating street. Traffic on Fifth Avenue was
light. It was the time between the morning rush hour and the noon break, when the streets became almost completely
gridlocked and the sidewalks were choked with pedestrians, making it next to impossible to go crosstown. The cab
floated past expensive boutiques and bookstores. They went by Fiorello's, the fashionable and overpriced alchemist's
that catered to the herbal and thaumaturgic needs of the chic set; Bloom's department store, with its display windows
full of mannequins wearing the lastest haute couture fashions, short hooded cloaks in multicolored pastels,, loose
trousers bloused at the ankle over short boots, and embroidered tunics with fake chain-mail shoulder pads. They
passed an elephant-shaped bus bearing a placard on its side advertising "A Chorus LineтАФthe longest running show
on Broadway!" It was the latest in a series of pre-Collapse revivals, and it was packing them in.
Wyrdrune couldn't understand the pre-Collapse nostalgia craze. While preparing a thesis he had once spent several
weeks in the Broadcasting Museum, viewing old pre-Collapse tapes. Unlike most people, he had concentrated on news
and documentaries rather than entertainment program-ming, and he didn't see what was so good about "the good old
days." He couldn't imagine how people could have lived like that, breathing air that turned their lungs black and going
deaf from all the noise. It had been a poisoned World, riddled with the cancer of technology. The Collapse had al-most
finished it once and for all.
It had happened at the close of the twenty-second century, an urban dark age brought about by international conflict
and abuse of the ecosystem. Solar energy, fusion, and other alternative energy programs were unable to compensate
for the dwindling natural resources due to persistent political and economic problems that curtailed their full
development. The pre-Collapse civilization had poisoned itself for profit and finally ran out of time. Cities burned. The
world was plunged into total anarchy, people killing each other for
food, eating rats, freezing to death. Back then, the sky over Manhattan had been a putrid brown-gray, at night turning
an irradiated purple. The water in the Hudson River had been so polluted, you could practically walk across it, and
New York Harbor was a sea of sludge. The streets had been oil-slicked, the pavements cracked and filled with
potholes. Now, a century later, they were turning green with flowering meadow grass and planted with gardens that
had a chance to thrive in the clean air. There was an atmosphere of great age about the city, but rebirth was taking
place amid decay. Rain, no longer laced with acid, was gradually washing the ancient buildings clean, and even if the
city was still dirty and overcrowded, it was nothing like what it used to be in the days before thaumaturgy became the
energy standard.
Only, nobody wanted to remember it that way. Instead they chose to romanticize the past. They even sold "nouveau
medieval" toys for children now, little windup cars with rub-ber wheels that drove around in circles on the floor,
making engine noises and belching dark, "authentic" hydrocarbon smoke. Sick. It was one thing to blend the grace of
twelfth-century clothing with twentieth-century fashion and call it nouveau medieval or renaissance punk, but what
the hell was supposed to be medieval about a car, anyway? They were getting everything ass backwards.
The cab lurched suddenly, and the driver shook his fist and cursed in Spanish at the cab that had cut them off.
"E'scuse me," the cabbie said, giving a nervous look in the rearview mirror.
"No problem," Wyrdrune said.