"Garbage Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

than Conrad would've expected, or perhaps farther away. In the golden-red glow
of the clouds it was hard to tell. But that was the direction Bascal led them:
away from the towers, toward the sunset.
The boys made a rough passage through the city: hooting, snatching at leaves,
kicking and leaping over benches, crowding people out of their way. There was no
law against being surly, and oh boy did it feel good. Still, Conrad couldn't
quite keep his eyes off the architecture. It was one of the few things he was
good at and cared about: the history of building, and of the buildings
themselves. Here, that history was written in the walls, layered like geological
strata.
"Look at the sidewalk," he said to Bascal. And when that was ignored, he tried,
"Look at that wall. Is it brick? It looks like brick."
"Whatever," Bascal replied, not mocking but barely looking, either. The question
didn't interest him.
Conrad tried it on Yinebeb Fecre. "You study architecture, Feck?"
Feck raised his limp, sarcastic hands again. "Ooh, architecture!"
Okay, so maybe it wasn't a popular subject. Still, it seemed important Ч
especially here. There were exactly two subjects Conrad hadn't failed in his
last school year: Architecture and Matter Programming. These he pursued with an
intensity that upset his teachers nearly as much as his apathy on the other
subjects. Only History had inspired any enthusiasm at all, and only because this
time it had included the Light Wars, which of course were the first intersection
of architecture and matter programming.
The moment wellstone Ч programmable matter Ч had found its way into the old
republics, the Light Wars had started. What anarchy: buildings greedily sucking
in ambient energy, dumping waste heat, offending the eye with patterns of
superreflector and superabsorber, with flashing lights, with blasts of
communication laser unfettered by any cable or conduit. It was much cheaper to
rustle energy out of the environment than to buy it off the grid, so all concern
for aesthetics had flown right out the window, overnight, along with concern for
the comfort of passersby and even, to some extent, for their safety. You could
have all the electricity you wanted, if you blackly drank every photon that
touched you. You could stay cool in the summertime, if your building was a
perfect mirror focusing the heat back on unfortunate neighbors. In fact, if you
were clever and obnoxious you could do both at the same time: deepening every
shadow, amplifying every pool of brightness for your own convenience.
This wasn't as crippling a blow to city life as the Fax Wars twenty years later,
but the scars remained even after the Queendom's founding, when the
Architectural Courtesy edicts were rammed through. Here in Denver you could
practically tell, just by looking, which decade each building had been
constructed in: here an ancient steel-framed structure of poured concrete, its
wellstone a mere facade. There a building of pure wellstone, held up against
gravity by the pressure of electrons in quantum dots. (This had struck Conrad as
a dumb idea the first moment he'd heard of it Ч what if there was a power
failure? Ч but truthfully he'd never heard of a case where one of these selfish
buildings had collapsed or dissolved. There must be all sorts of safeguards.)
The majority of the buildings were post-Queendom: diamond frames and floors,
with wellstone sheathing and facing. But even these had been dressed down, made
to resemble materials of more or less natural origin.
Denver, like most of the really great cities, had forcibly regressed itself to