"Michael Swanwick - The Edge of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

The Edge of the World
Michael Swanwick
The day that Donna and Piggy and Russ went to see the Edge of the World was a hot one. They
were sitting on the curb by the gas station that noontime, sharing a Coke and watching the big Starlifters
lumber up into the air, one by one, out of Toldenarba AFB. The sky rumbled with their passing. There'd
been an incident in the Persian Gulf, and half the American forces in the Twilight Emirates were on alert.
"My old man says when the Big One goes up, the base will be the first to go," Piggy said
speculatively. "Treaties won't allow us to defend it. One bomber comes in high and whaboom"тАФhe
made soft nuclear explosion noisesтАФ"it's all gone." He was wearing camouflage pants and a khaki T-shirt
with an iron-on reading: KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT. Donna watched as he took
off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. His face went slack and vacant, then livened as he put them
back on again, as if he were playing with a mask.
"You should be so lucky," Donna said. "Mrs. Khashoggi is still going to want that paper done on
Monday morning, Armageddon or not."
"Yeah, can you believe her?" Piggy said. "That weird accent! And all that memorization! Cut me
some slack. I mean, who cares whether Ackronnion was part of the Mezentian Dynasty?"
"You ought to care, dipshit," Russ said. "Local history's the only decent class the school's got." Russ
was the smartest boy Donna had ever met, never mind the fact that he was flunking out. He had soulful
eyes and a radical haircut, short on the sides with a dyed-blond punklock down the back of his neck.
"Man, I opened the Excerpts from Epics text that first night, thinking it was going to be the same old
bullshit, and I stayed up 'til dawn. Got to school without a wink of sleep, but I'd managed to read every
last word. This is one weird part of the world; its history is full of dragons and magic and all kinds of
weird monsters. Do you realize that in the eighteenth century three members of the British legation were
eaten by demons? That's in the historical record!"
Russ was an enigma to Donna. The first time they'd met, hanging with the misfits at an American
School dance, he'd tried to put a hand down her pants, and she'd slugged him good, almost breaking his
nose. She could still hear his surprised laughter as blood ran down his chin. They'd been friends ever
since. Only there were limits to friendship, and now she was waiting for him to make his move and hoping
he'd get down to it before her father was rotated out.
In Japan she'd known a girl who had a taken a razor blade and carved her boyfriend's name in the
palm of her hand. How could she do that, Donna had wanted to know? Her friend had shrugged, said,
"As long as it gets me noticed." It wasn't until Russ that Donna understood.
"Strange country," Russ said dreamily. "The sky beyond the Edge is supposed to be full of demons
and serpents and shit. They say that if you stare into it long enough, you'll go mad."
They all three looked at one another.
"Well, hell," Piggy said. "What are we waiting for?"

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. They bicycled through the American enclave
into the old native quarter. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks,
rusted-out buses, even yachts up in cradles with staved-in sides. Garage doors were black mouths
hissing and spitting welding sparks, throbbing to the hammered sound of worked metal. They hid their
bikes in a patch of scrub apricot trees where the railroad crossed the industrial canal and hiked across.
Time had altered the character of the city where it bordered the Edge. Gone were the archers in
their towers, vigilant against a threat that never came. Gone were the rose quartz palaces with their
thousand windows, not a one of which overlooked the Edge. The battlements where blind musicians
once piped up the dawn now survived only in Mrs. Khashoggi's texts. Where they had been was now a
drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those
beyond reach of vandals' stones painted over in patchwork squares of gray and faded blue.
A steam whistle sounded and lines of factory workers shambled back inside, brown men in chinos
and white shirts, Syrian and Lebanese laborers imported to do work no native Toldenarban would touch.