"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 01 - Child of the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

no different from the shoddy cardboard coffins of the poor
or the enameled wooden coffins of the artisans and traders.
And then the baby started to cry.




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20J%20-%20Confluence1%20Child%20of%20the%20River.txt (13 of 508)10-12-2006 21:55:16
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20J%20-%20Confluence1%20Child%20of%20the%20River.txt

The Constable squinted through the light, saw something
move within it, and reached out. For a moment he was at
the incandescent heart of the machines' intricate dance, and
then they were gone, dispersing in flat trajectories into the
darkness. The baby, a boy, pale and fat and hairless, squirmed
in the Constable's hands.
The golden light was dying back inside the white boat. In
moments, only traces remained, iridescent veins and dabs that
fitfully illuminated the corpse on which the baby had been
lying.
It was the corpse of a woman, naked, flat-breasted and
starveling thin, and as hairless as the baby. She had been
shot, once through the chest and once in the head, but there
was no blood. One hand was three fingered, like the grabs
of the cranes of Aeolis's docks; the other was monstrously
swollen and bifurcate, like a lobster's claw. Her skin had a
silvery-gray cast; her huge eyes, divided into a honeycomb
of cells, were like the compound lenses of certain insects,
and the color of blood rubies. Within each facet lived a flickering
glint of golden light, and although the Constable knew
that these were merely reflections of the white boat's fading
light, he had the strange feeling that things, malevolently
watchful things, lived behind the dead woman's strange




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20J%20-%20Confluence1%20Child%20of%20the%20River.txt (14 of 508)10-12-2006 21:55:16
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/McAuley,%20Paul%20J%20-%20Confluence1%20Child%20of%20the%20River.txt

eyes.
"Heresy, " the second trader said. Somehow, he had got
up on his knees and was staring wide-eyed at the white boat.
The Constable kicked the trader in the stomach; the man
coughed and flopped back into the bilge water alongside his
partner. The trader glared up at the Constable and said again,
"Heresy. When they allowed the ship of the Ancients of
Days to pass beyond Ys and sail downriver, our benevolent
bureaucracies let heresy loose into the world."