"Geoff Ryman - The Unconquered Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ryman Geoff)

In the middle of the night, Third felt hot breath on her cheeks, and opened her eyes.
Looming over her, as large as she was, was the face of the tiger. There was blood on
its muzzle, and its great green eyes stared into her, piercing her like shafts, brushing,
it seemed, her very soul, making it go hushed and cold. Third did not move. There
was nothing she could do. The tiger snuffled her once more and then, having eaten
already, silently padded away on its big orange feet. Third looked, and saw that her
mother and sister were still alive.
Third couldn't sleep after that, so she tried count-ing the stars. It was so slow. One.
Two. Three.
Suddenly there was a great rising out of her of numbers. A rage of numbers, the old
numbers, angry and dislocated. They reached up out of her for some-thing, some
answer, some reason. They almost seized it. The size of the world. The number of
the People. Third felt her breath and heart constrict. The numbers withdrew like a
flock of birds into the sky. She could almost hear them cawing. She saw the pattern
they made. It was the pattern of the future, black wings and tiger stripes.
In the morning, she stood up when her mother did and told her nothing about it.


PART TWO: THE CEREMONY
The city of Saprang Song had paved streets, over 2,000 of them, and plumbing,
enough for a million people. By the time Third was an adult, eight million, half of the
People, had crowded into it.
The old city was made of stone and steel: the new city was made of flesh. The
Neighbors had introduced a new kind of mobile home. It was slow and stupid, a
long beige tube, with ribs in its ceiling, and a single window, and a single door.
When it was closed, the door looked like the bottom of a mushroom, all gills. When
it opened, a flap of flesh came out like a tongue, steps to climb.


The new city
The houses were supposed to spread out, across the countryside. Instead, the
refugees discovered that the houses could climb, on legs that looked like the cooked
wings of chickens. They had long hairs like wires at the tip. The houses could cling
to each other's backs. As the refugees swarmed, the houses rose up in haphazard
towers, tall lopsided heaps of housing, waves of it, with no streets between them.
They looked like a piled mass of Conestoga wagons.
The People had to walk up and over each other's houses to get to their own, or
squeeze through narrow passageways past houses turned into tiny shops or brothels.
They shouted at each other to be quiet, and fended off new, creeping houses with
brooms. Lines of laundry, gray and faded, hung between the towers, and the air was
always full of the smell of cooking and the hearty blare of media entertainment.
Sometimes the ribs of the lowest houses would break from the weight, and the
towers would collapse in a fleshy ava-lanche. In the monsoon rains, the water would
drain down the towers in steps, like waterfalls, and flood the lowest layers. The
houses would go very diseased, soft and bruised and seeping. The very poorest
people dried the dead ones, and lived in the husks. Or they ate them.
They fought with municipal beasts that prowled the streets eating garbage and the
unloved dead.
Third was going to sell her left eye. It was com-mon practice. There were dealers.
They would prize it out of her, without any drugs for the pain, and freeze it, and sell