"Michael Swanwick - The Wireless Folly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

"The Wireless Folly", by Michael Swanwick. First printed in Thunder's Shadow Collector's Magazine,
February 1992. Transcribed from _A Geography Of Unknown Lands_ w/o permission.
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It may have begun as a rambling Victorian resort hotel, a fantasia of gingerbread and gables, with wide
verandas and oceanic lawns. Or perhaps a dark, Gothic structure, part castle and part cathedral,
squatting like a toad over twisting, labyrinthine catacombs--the core is lost in elaboration and addition,
the newspapers of the time are silent on the matter, and both elements are present in the mustier reaches.

Indeed, the original building (whatever it was) was not even finished when renovations began. It was a
spirited and high-willed family that laid the foundations and they agreed on nothing. Glass photographs
from its early glory days show an elaborate pile of building, recomplicated with trap-doors and hidden
passages within, and topiary gardens and ha-has without. It had already overgrown several neighboring
structures.

However begun, the building goes deep. The stone tunnels, with water seeping down the walls and the
occasional scurrying rat, have never been thoroughly mapped. And while a few stones have loosened
underfoot and the mortar is slowly melting into stalactites, so that one is never sure if a passage is natural
or now, they are still serviceable.

With the scattering of the original family (there are those who claim they merely withdrew into the
interior), the building fell into disrepair, ferns dying by the slow decade in the yellowed parlors, and a few
disreputable roomers haunting the porches. The Great Depression was on, and plummeting property
values put the structure within reach of the meager pooled resources of the newly-formed Greater Verne
County Wireless Association. The Wireless Association was made up of sincerely young men with
skinhead crewcuts and ears that stuck out to the side. These engineers manque would argue late into the
night over resistors and magnetic fields and then stay up to dawn, wrapping coils. I is possible to imagine
them now, a pipe stuck in the corner of the mouth, oily cup of Java growing cold by an elbow, as they
earnestly invented the future. One can almost hear the sporadic sizzle of a soldering iron.

They built their additions with an absent-minded casualness. Sheds and crude barns were needed to
contain the stinks and fumes and explosions of their experiments. They stuck antennae on all the cupolas
and cornices, so that the roof fairly bristled, and dug concrete-lined rocket pits in the old croquet
grounds.

There is a certain nostalgia for those rough additions nowadays, perhaps because some few (fewer with
each passing year, alas!) of the original members are still with us. You may find them in the leather chair
of the smokers lounge, gin-and-tonics in hand, maundering on about quartz crystals, and the night they
first raised Kansas City, to the inexpressible embarrassment of some of the younger, more cosmopolitan
members.

Early on they were joined by other eccentrics--not their type, you'd think, and yet there was the kinship
of outcasts among them, or perhaps simply an aloof, unnoticing toleration. These newcomers were
occultists of varied ill-defined convictions, and filled the place with orgone generators, maps of Lemuria
and the hollow earth, cutaway models of the Great Pyramid, and ghost-catching machines. Many of the
more whimsically useless towers and puzzlingly misleading passageways were built in this era. One
inevitably thinks of the east stairway which, after many twists and turns and not an option to get off,
deposits its unwary victim back at its own landing. Or the Salem room , built by a reclusive young
bachelor, which is all strange and eldritch angles and has a single occulus window overlooking the
moon-barren slate roofs. And from which the occasional member has been rumored to have vanished.