"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Every so often a small deer would bound on to the path, take one look at us and sprint away, its
thudding hooves unexpectedly loud.
Most of the ruins on either side were covered with ivy, its green cables silently and slowly
dragging the crumbled brickwork back into the earth. Some of the walls, however, bore the marks
of recent repair, with clay and wattle or bricks cannibalized from other ruins making good the gaps,
and the roofs usually a floor or two lower than the originals beamed and thatched. There were
clearings where entire villages had been built from recycled materials, with not a trace of the
original buildings left standing. We got used to treating rising smoke ahead as a signal to slow
down and watch out for scuttling chickens, ambling pigs, barking dogs and racing, yelling children.
The interest of the adults varied from covert and sullen to open and servile, the latter type
frantically drawing our attention to wares that were depicted or described on garish signboards.
I put to Suze a question that had occurred to me from comparing old political maps with the
current geographical ones: that the present communities might be remnants of the ancient, with
Christian fundamentalists flourishing here, anarchic tribes around Alexandra Port, usurers still
haunting the leaning towers down by the river, Muslims to the east and Hindus to the west ... but
she disabused me of this fanciful notion. The vast migrations of the Death and the dark century had
literally walked over the great city, leaving of its former fractious cultures not a trace.
The human traffic on the path increased as, over the next hour, we approached Camden Market.
There were few powered vehicles, and horse-drawn ones were only a little more frequent.
Pedestrians generally walked in groups: gay parties of tourists with rucksacks and rifles, who
waved and greeted us as we passed; and serious squads of non-cos, tramping with heavy loads on
their backs, or on overburdened animals, or on similarly overloaded carts. The noncos usually
spared us no more than a calculating glance or a canny smile.
Camden Lock Market, a vast, trampled clearing at the intersection of several roads and a major
canal, had the look of a place which the trees and their worshippers had never conquered. Like
Alexandra Port, but for economic rather than strategic reasons, it had remained alive and
functioning through all the disasters that had befallen the city. In physical extent it was actually
larger than it had been in the twenty-first century, because some of LondonтАЩs other traditional
markets, in the East, were now six feet under the Thames estuary at low tide.
Our first stop was the Union depot, a stockaded area on the edge of the market. Inside the
casually guarded gate were a low garage, a Warehouse, and a rest-and-recreation building. Suze
gave the last a disparaging glance.
тАЬFor wimps,тАЭ she remarked. тАЬWhatтАЩs the point of coming here if youтАЩre not willing to mix?тАЭ
After weтАЩd garaged the vehicle, hoisted our packs, holstered our 3I pistols and wandered around
for a few minutes, I began to see exactly what the point was. The place was guaranteed to give
most Union people a severe culture shock. To me it looked like utter chaos, and sounded to use
words whose roots lie in ancient experiences of similar situations like a barbarous babel.
The market consisted of: long fenced-off areas packed with sadeyed beasts; marble tables
running with the blood, piled with the flesh of beasts; fish swimming in glass tanks or flopping on
slabs; canopied wooden tables stacked with pottery, weaponry, books, machinery, clothes, textiles,
herbs, drugs, antiquities, foodstuffs; racks from which coats swayed and dresses fluttered in the
warm breeze.
Each of the stalls and tables had behind it someone whose fulltime occupation was minding it,
watching over it, talking to anybody on the other side of the table and passing wares over and
taking money back. The sellers and the buyers filled the air with the sound of their dickering,
bickering, joking, teasing, offering, refusing; and with the recorded music which every stall-holder,
and most of their customers, discordantly inflicted on everybody else, played at an unsociable
volume from portable devices which were aptly called loudspeakers.
Then there were the smells: of the animals and their dung and their slaughter, of the people and
their sweat and the scents which failed to disguise it, of smoked herbal drugs which were, I began