"James Lovegrove - Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lovegrove James)

air, he descends into a hail of hurrahs. When he kites along a corridor,
keeping pace with the rest of his class as they hurry from one lesson to
the next, they grin and encourage him every flap of the way. During break
time Az is asked to join half a dozen impromptu games of balloonball, and
though he has never played before, has only ever watched from the
sidelines, he soon gets the hang of it, and even scores a Horizontal
Slide. The seal is put on his popularity when Mrs Ragual interrupts Phys.
Ed. to ask Az for a demonstration. The class goes outside and Az soars and
barrel-rolls and loop-the-loops for their benefit. Mrs Ragual tells him he
is not just a good flyer, he is a great flyer. Then the rest of them join
him in the air, and together, under Mrs Ragual's approving eye, they pass
a happy, truant half-hour simply doing what they like best, wheeling and
whirling and squealing and squalling like a flock of mad seagulls. All the
time Az is the centre of attention, the focus of everybody's admiration.
After all, anyone who can make one of Mrs Ragual's Phys. Ed. torture
sessions FUN has to be some kind of a hero.
He woke up. He dared to touch his back. Still wingless. He rolled
disconsolately over onto his side to look out of the window at Cloudcap
City all laid out in neat rows and columns and tiers, up, down, left,
right, reaching as high as the stratosphere and as low as the cloudtop and
as far as the horizon, each block suspended by means of six-way
electromagnetic positional stabilisers to form a three-dimensional
latticework of buildings, between and through and around which tiny
figures and aircraft of all shapes and sizes were threading their way.
Most of the buildings were cubic in shape, but there were oddities. The
cylinder of the Freefall Dance Palace was one, the annular Aerobowl
another, the spike-spired mace-ball fantasy of the Cathedral of the
Significant God a notable third.
The air being clear and his eyes being sharp, Az could make out the
bird-trawlers a mile below on the cloudtop, casting their nets into the
wilderness of white. He could also make out the sky-mines that ringed the
city, forming a circle of stability on which the whole meniscus of
floating buildings depended. The sky-mines looked like tulips balancing on
lofty, delicately slender stems which pierced the cloudtop and went all
the way down to the Ground, from where they sucked up the juices that kept
the city running. Service elevators, like glass aphids, crawled up and
down the stems.
He lay there watching the view for he didn't know how long. It seemed like
no time and all time had passed when his mother called up from below,
summoning him down for supper. Az clumped down to the kitchen, from which
emanated smells which even his gloom-ridden brain recognised as
mouthwatering.
"Go and call your father," said his mother. "Then you can lay the table."
Az went out into the hallway again, walked along a little way and stopped
at the large trapdoor that led down to his father's workshop. He listened
hard, and heard from below faint sounds of banging and tocking, clonking
and clanging.
Construction. While a working man, Az's father had spent much of his spare
time dabbling in home improvements, which were usually for Az's benefit,
like the steps and all the doorways in the house. When his forty-year