"Daniel Keys Moran - Armageddon Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

Ruins of the old world lay all about them, wherever one looked. Old buildings, the frames of karz; even,
in some places, where ancient builders had lined concrete with polymer bases, stretches of good roads.
Still, for Jalian, none of these, not even the few good roads, matched the straight and clean and serene
beauty of her place:

The Big Road.

Like the path of a thrown knife, the Big Road stretched away as far as the eye could see, west and north
toward the far hills that ringed the other end of the valley, toward the mountains that legend said the Clan
had walked down from in the days after the Big Crunch. For as far as Jalian could see, the Big Road ran
true.

The Big Road, where Jalian came to it, was bordered by one of the largest and worst of the Burns. If
one had known the Big Road before the bombs fell, that person might have been able to tell Jalian that
the Big Road was not supposed to be partially melted; but there was nobody to tell Jalian that, and she
supposed that the Big Road had always been that way.

(Even before the missiles came burning from the sky, this spot had held a laboratory in which there were
radioactive materials stored for testing. When the bombs went down and then up again, strange things
had happened there.) That was more than seven centuries ago; to Jalian's eyes, the Burn still sparkled
faintly.

Jalian stood at the spot where she usually ascended to the Big Road.

It was a desolate area at the edge of the concrete, where a plant that resembled ivy had survived the
radiation long enough to breach the Big Road's protective guardrail. Dirt and dust, working their ways
into the body of the dead ivy mutant, had formed a small, natural incline that Jalian was able to scramble
up and make her way onto the concrete of the Big Road itself. She paused at the edge of the Big Road,
her feet still on dirt but only a step away from the concrete.

This would be only the second time that Jalian had set foot on the Big Road.

The first time, one of the HuntersтАФJalian could not remember who it had been, except that it was not an
Elder Hunter because she did not wear the white tunic of an Elder HunterтАФhad taken a group of children
from the Girls' House with her on routine patrol of Silver-Eyes borders. The patrol had made camp at the
edge of the hills, while the four- and five- and six-year-olds scrambled over the Big Road. Later, one of
the younger women in the patrol told the children about the land of gods and demons at its end.

Then she had tried to run away, and been caught by Ralesh.
This time, Jalian had a third-day start. They would not catch her.

They would not.

The twentieth century, as viewed by Jalian d'Arsenette, consists of freeways.

(The twentieth century saw the birth of the thermoexplosive and the freeway. Jalian could almost forgive
one for the other.)

(Almost.)