"Recording Angel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

shoulder, flipping their quirts back and forth as if to drive off flies. Metal
tags braided into the tassels of the quirts wink and flicker; the magistrates'
flared red cloaks seem inflamed in the last light of the sun.
The people make a rising and falling hum, the sound of discontent. They are
looking upriver. Mr Naryan, with a catch in his heart, realises what they must
be looking at.
It is a speck of light on the horizon, where the broad ribbon of the river and
the broad ribbon of the land narrow to a single point. It is the lighter towing
Angel's ship, at the end of its long journey to the desert city where she has
taken refuge, and caught Mr Naryan in the net of her tale.



Mr Naryan first heard about Angel from Dreen, Sensch's Commissioner; in fact,
Dreen paid a visit to Mr Naryan's house to convey the news in person. His
passage through the narrow streets of the quarter was the focus of a swelling
congregation which kept a space two paces wide around him as he ambled towards
the house where Mr Naryan had his apartment.
Dreen was a lively but tormented fellow who was paying off a debt of conscience
by taking the more or less ceremonial position of Commissioner in this remote
city which his ancestors had long ago abandoned. Slight and agile, his head
clean-shaven except for a fringe of polychrome hair that framed his parchment
face, he looked like a lily blossom swirling on the Great River's current as he
made his way through the excited crowd. A pair of magistrates preceded him and a
remote followed, a mirror-coloured seed that seemed to move through the air in
brief rapid pulses like a squeezed watermelon pip. A swarm of lesser machines
spun above the packed heads of the crowd. Machines did not entirely trust the
citizens, with good reason. Change Wars raged up and down the length of
Confluence as, one by one, the ten thousand races of the Shaped fell from
innocence.
Mr Naryan, alerted by the clamour, was already standing on his balcony when
Dreen reached the house. Scrupulously polite, his voice amplified through a
little machine that fluttered before his lips, Dreen enquired if he might come
up. The crowd fell silent as he spoke, so that his last words echoed eerily up
and down the narrow street. When Mr Naryan said mildly that the Commissioner was
of course always welcome, Dreen made an elaborate genuflection and scrambled
straight up the fretted carvings which decorated the front of the apartment
house. He vaulted the wrought iron rail and perched in the ironwood chair that
Mr Naryan usually took when he was tutoring a pupil.
While Mr Naryan lowered his corpulent bulk onto the stool that was the only
other piece of furniture on the little balcony, Dreen said cheerfully that he
had not walked so far for more than a year. He accepted the tea and sweetmeats
that Mr Naryan's wife, terrified by his presence, offered, and added, "It really
would be more convenient if you took quarters appropriate to your status."
As Commissioner, Dreen had use of the vast palace of intricately carved pink
sandstone that dominated the southern end of the city, although he chose to live
in a tailored habitat of hanging gardens that hovered above the palace's spiky
towers.
Mr Naryan said, "My calling requires that I live amongst the people. How else
would I understand their stories? How else would they find me?"