"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - Dreampark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

mud clouded their view. Then the silt settled, and they had their first look at the sunken city.
Tony whistled appreciatively. The lost buildings of Wilshire Boulevard stretched off in a double
row in the distance. Some lay crumpled and broken; others still stood, waterlogged but strong.
The green path carried them past a wall covered in amateurish murals, the bright paints faded. To
both sides now, a wide empty stretch of seabottom, smooth, gently rolling, with sunken trees
growing in clumps, and a seaweed forest anchored among them
the Los Angeles Country Club? Beyond, a gas station, pumps standing like ancient sentries, a
disintegrating hand-lettered sign:

CLOSED
NO GAS TILL 7:00 AM TUESDAY

The small Mediterranean type said, "These are not props. They were taken with a camera. I have
been skin diving here."
As the green path carried them down, they saw taller and taller buildings sunk deeper in the muck.
Where towering structures had crashed into ruin there were shapeless chunks of cement piled into
heaps stories high, barnacled and covered with flora. Fish cruised among the shadows. Some nosed
up to the airbreathing intruders and wiggled in dance for them.
Acacia pointed. "Look, Tony, we're coming up on that building." It was a single-story shop nestled
between a crumbled restaurant and a parking lot filled with rusted hulks. The path carried them
through its doors, and Gwen grabbed Acacia's hand.
"Look. It isn't even rusted." The sculpture was beautiful, wrought from scrap steel and copper,
and sealed in a block of lucite. It was one of the few things in the room that hadn't been ruined.
The building had been an art gallery. Now, paintings peeled from their frames and fluttered weakly
in the current. Carved wood had swollen and rotted. A pair of simple kinetic sculptures were
clotted with mud and sand.
The narrator continued. "Fully half of the multiple-story structures in California collapsed,
including many of the 'earthquake-proof' buildings. The shoreline moved inland an average of three
miles, and water damage added hundreds of millions to the total score."
The green path was taking them out of the art gallery, looping back into the Street.
Acacia shook her head soberly, lost in thought. "What must it have been like on that day?" she
murmured. "I can't even imagine." Tony held her hand and was silent.
Once people had walked these streets. Once there had been life, and noise, and flowers growing,
and the raucous blare of cars vying for road space. Once, California had been a political leader,
a trend-setter, with a tremendous influx of tourists and prospective residents. But that was
before the Great Quake, the catastrophe that broke California's back, sent her industry and
citizenry scampering for cover.
But for Cowles Industries, and a few other large companies that believed in the promise of the
Golden State, California would still be pulling itself out of the greatest disaster in American
history. The tranquil Pacific covered the worst of the old scars . . . but they were looking under
the bandage now.
Beneath a crumbled block of stone sprawled a shattered skeleton, long since picked clean. Eyes in
the skull seemed to flick toward them. Acacia's hand clamped hard on Tony's arm, and she felt him
jump, before she saw that a crab's claws were waving within the skull's eye sockets.
Now bones were everywhere. Impassively, the recorded voice went on. "Despite extensive salvage
operations, the mass of lost equipment and personal possessions remains buried beneath the waves.
. ."


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