"Jeff VanderMeer - Quin's Shanghai Circus (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

Quin's Shanghai Circus
a short story by Jeff VanderMeer

Let me tell you why I wished to buy a meerkat at Quin's Shanghai Circus.
Let me tell you about the city: The city is sharp, the city is a cliche
performed with cardboard and painted sparkly colors to disguise the empty
center -- the hole.
(That's mine -- the words. I specialize in holo art, but every once in a
chemical moon I'll do the slang jockey thing on paper.)
Let me tell you what the city means to me. So you'll understand about the
meerkat, because it's important. Very important: Back a decade, when the
social planners ruled, we called it Dayton Central. Then, when the central
government choked flat and the police all went freelance, we started
calling it Veniss -- like an adder's hiss, deadly and unpredictable. Art
was Dead here until Veniss. Art before Veniss was just Whore Hole stuff,
street mimes with flexi-faces and flat media.
That's what the Social Revolutions meant to me -- not all the redrum riots
and the twisted girders and the flourishing free trade markets and the
hundred-meter-high ad signs sprouting on every street corner. Not the
garbage zones, not the ocean junks, not the underlevel coups, nor even the
smell of glandular drugs, musty yet sharp. No, Veniss brought Old Art to
an end, made me dream of suck-cess, with my omni-present, omni-everything
holovision.
Almost brought me to an end as well one day, for in the absence of those
policing elements of society (except for pay-for-hire), two malicious
thieves -- nay, call them what they were: Pick Dicks -- well, these two
pick dicks stole all my old-style ceramics and new style holosculpture
and, after mashing me on the head with a force that split my brains all
over the floor, split too. Even my friend Shadrach Begolem showed concern
when he found me. (A brooding sort, my friend Begolem: no blinks: no
twitches: no tics. All economy of motion, of energy, of time. Eyee, the
opposite of me.) But we managed to rouse an autodoc from its wetwork
slumber and got me patched up (Boy, did that hurt!).
Afterwards, I sat alone in my apartment/studio, crying as I watched
nuevo-westerns on a holo Shadrach lent me. All that work gone! The faces
of the city, the scenes of the city, that had torn their way from my mind
to the holo, forever lost -- never even shown at a galleria, and not
likely to have been, either. Veniss, huh! The adder defanged. The snake
slithering away. When did anyone care about the real artists until after
they were dead? And I was as close to Dead as any Living Artist ever was.
I had no supplies. My money had all run out on me -- plastic rats
deserting a paper ship. I was a Goner, all those Artistic Dreams so many
arthritic flickers in a holoscreen. (You don't have a cup of water on you,
by any chance? Or a pill or two?)

I think I always had Artistic Dreams.
When we were little, my twinned sister Nicola and I made up these fabric
creatures we called cold pricklies and, to balance the equation, some warm
fuzzies. All through the sizzling summers of ozone rings and water
conservation and baking metal, we'd be indoors with our make-believe world