"China Mieville - The Scar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

The Scar




Yet the memory would not set into the setting sun, that green and frozen glance to the wide blue sea
where broken hearts are wrecked out of their wounds. A blind sky bleached white the intellect of human
bone, skinning the emotions from the fracture to reveal the grief underneath. And the mirror reveals me,
a naked and vulnerable fact.

тАФDambudzo Marechera,Black Sunlight




file:///G|/eMule/Incoming/Mieville,%20China%20-%20Scar(Htm)/miev_0345454898_oeb_epi_r1.html14-7-2004 2:49:40
 The Scar




A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.

It has been given many names. Each inlet and bay and stream has been classified as if it were discrete.
But it is one thing, where borders are absurd. It fills the spaces between stones and sand, curling around
coastlines and filling trenches between the continents.

At the edges of the world the salt water is cold enough to burn. Huge slabs of frozen sea mimic the land,
and break and crash and reform, crisscrossed with tunnels, the homes of frost-crabs, philosophers with
shells of living ice. In the southern shallows there are forests of pipe-worms and kelp and predatory
corals. Sunfish move with idiot grace. Trilobites make nests in bones and dissolving iron.

The sea throngs.

There are free-floating top-dwellers that live and die in surf without ever seeing dirt beneath them.
Complex ecosystems flourish in neritic pools and flatlands, sliding on organic scree to the edge of rock
shelves and dropping into a zone below light.

There are ravines. Presences something between molluscs and deities squat patiently below eight miles
of water. In the lightless cold a brutality of evolution obtains. Rude creatures emit slime and
phosphorescence and move with flickerings of unclear limbs. The logic of their forms derives from
nightmares.

There are bottomless shafts of water. There are places where the granite and muck base of the sea falls
away in vertical tunnels that plumb miles, spilling into other planes, under pressure so great that the
water flows sluggish and thick. It spurts through the pores of reality, seeping back in dangerous washes,
leaving fissures through which displaced forces can emerge.

In the chill middle deeps, hydrothermic vents break through the rocks and spew clouds of superheated
water. Intricate creatures bask in this ambient warmth their whole short lives, never straying beyond a