"Jeff VanderMeer - Balzac's War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

"I'll deal with Jeffer," he said with new-found confidence, although as he led her forward he didn't dare to
see if she was impressed or just amused.

Straight to the city's heart they went, the buildings encroaching on the highway, while beneath their feet,
four o'clocks, cactus blossoms, and sedgeweeds thrust up through cracks in the highway pavement.
Scuttling through these miniature oases, anonymous gray lizards waged a war with coppery metal
scorpions that pursued with mechanical implacability, their electric stingers singing static to the wind. Con
Fegman had shown them one cracked open: beneath the metal exterior lay the red meat of flesh and
blood.

Balzac loved even this most deadly part of the mystery that was Balthakazar. All the cr├иche
machines-heirlooms from centuries past--broke down regularly and had to be cannibalized to repair
other machines, and yet the Con members did nothing. Even practical Jeffer must realized that some day
there would be no machines at all. Some day only the dormant technologies of the city would save them.

"Look at the bones," Jamie said, and pointed at the ground. Scattered across the highway were
whitish-gray shards. It made Balzac shiver to think about it. Bones did not fit his pristine, cold-metal
vision of Balthakazar in its prime.

"How do you know it's bone? It could be plastic or mortar, or almost anything."

"It's bone. Why else do you think the Con members don't move us back into the city. Why they don't
even want us to visit?"

"Because, at night creatures come out of the underground levels, things with sharp teeth, and they eat
you."

Jamie threw her head back and laughed; Balzac could see the smooth skin of her neck and marveled at
its perfection even as he blushed and said, "It's not funny." Yet even her laughter pleased him.

"You," she said, wiping tears from her eyes. "I stopped believing in that old tale a long time ago."

Something in his expression must have given him away, because she shocked him by saying, gently, "I'm
sorry about your parents - really, I am - but the only truth is this," and she bent to pick up a shard that
might have been bone. "My father says no one knows what did this. If these are just old graves opened
by the sands or if something killed them all off." She paused, looked at him oddly, as if weighing her
options, then said, "My father brought me here when I was much younger, and I just liked the texture of
the bones. I didn't know what they were. All I knew was that they felt good to touch - lightweight and
with those porous grooves - and that my father was there with me after so many nights away from the
cr├иche, showing me something that filled him with awe." She tossed the shard aside. "It's only bits of
bone, anyhow. Whatever happened happened a long time ago. There's nothing to be done for them."

True enough, and it was a reassurance to know that the years had created a barrier between him and the
bones, so he could look at them as curious reminders of another age. How many times had Con Fegman,
or even Jeffer, retold the old legends from before the collapse of the cities, as if the mere repetition would
fend off the spirits of the dead?

"Come on," Balzac said. "Let's go." This time he did not hold her hand.

The pavement became hot, cool, then hot again as the sun sliced through the spaces between structures.