"China Mieville - Perdido Street Station" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

CHINA
MIEVILLE
PERDIDO STREET
STATION
тАЬI even gave up, for a while, stopping by the window of the room to look out at the
lights and deep, illuminated streets. ThatтАЩs a form of dying, that losing contact with
the city like that.тАЭ

Philip K. Dick, We Can Build You
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the
earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the riverтАЩs edge have
grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.
We rock. We pitch in a deep current.
Behind me the man tugs uneasily at his rudder and the barge corrects. Light
lurches as the lantern swings. The man is afraid of me. I lean out from the prow of
the small vessel across the darkly moving water.
Over the engines oily rumble and the caresses of the river small sounds, house
sounds, are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and
floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they
spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain.
They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their
roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick.
The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on
the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-
blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this
extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers.
It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky
even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its
weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the calls of beasts, the obscene clash
and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy
like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things,
ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling
the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone,
libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal
claws that lift cargoes from the water.
How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets
the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller?
It is too late to flee.

The man murmurs to me, tells me where we are. I do not turn to him.
This is RavenтАЩs Gate, this brutalized warren around us. The rotting buildings lean
against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls
risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here.
(I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you
came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear,
like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot
stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud
towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not
think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)
Here there are houses which dribble pale mucus, an organic daubing that smears