"Jack Vance - To Live Forever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

blocks; then came the suburbs, the industrial purlieus, the nondescript
backlands extending out past the range of vision. The best residential
areasтАФBalliasse, Eardiston, Vandoon, Temple CloudтАФoccupied hillsides north and
south overlooking the river. Everywhere was motion, the quiver of vitality,
the sense of human effort. A million windows flickered in the sunlight,
vehicles darkened the boulevards, shoals of aircraft meshed along the avenues
of the air. Men and women walked briskly along the streets to their
destinations, wasting no time.

Across the river lay Glade County, a wasteland, drab, flat and dreary,
without use or habitation, where nothing grew except stunted willows and
rust-colored rushes. Glade County had no reason for being except the fact that
it included the six hundred acres of Carnevalle.

Against the dismal background of Glade County, Carnevalle blazed like a
flower on a slag-heap. Its six hundred acres held a treasure of color, of
pageantry, of spectacular devices for diversion and thrill and catharsis.

In Clarges itself life was confined to the activity of men. Carnevalle
knew a life of its own. In the morning there was silence. At noon the swish of
cleaning equipment and an occasional footstep might be heard. In the afternoon
Carnevalle came to life, preening and shuddering like a new butterfly. When
the sun sank there was a momentary lull, then a swift surge into such vitality
and emotion as to deny the very concept of oblivion.

Around the periphery swung the comet-cars of the Grand Pyroteck: the
Sangreal Rubloon, the Golden Gloriana, the Mystic Emeraud, the Melancthon and
the Ultra-Lazuti, each a different color, each casting a different glow from
its flaming train. The pavilions gave off prismatic refractions; the pagodas
dripped molten liquid; a myriad lumes floated like a haze of fireflies. Along
the avenues, through the alleys and lanes, the crowds streamed and shifted. To
the sounds of the thrill-rides, to the hiss and thwashh when the cars of the
Grand Pyrotek passed over, to the calls of barkers and hucksters, to the tones
of plangent zither, hoarse accordion, chiming zovelle, plaintive lemurka,
bright ectreen, were added the shuffle of a hundred thousand feet, the
undertone of excitement, cries of shock and surprise and delight.

As the night went on, the intoxication of Carnevalle became a thing in
itself. The celebrants pressed through the noise, the hundred horns and
musics; they breathed aromatic dusts and pastel fogs; they wore costumes and
headgear and masks; restraints were brittle films, to be broken with pleasure.
They explored the strange and the curious, toyed with vertigo and paroxysm,
tested the versatility of the human nerve.

Midnight at Carnevalle saw the peak of tumult. Compunction no longer
existed; virtue and vice had no meaning. At times the outbursts of laughter
became wild weeping, but this quickly subsided and was in the nature of a
spiritual orgasm. As the night grew dim, the crowds became slower, more
hesitant; costumes were in disorder, masks were discarded. Men and women,
sleepy, wan, stupefied, stumbled into the drops of the tube-system to be