"Jeff Vandermeer- Veniss Underground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

THE SEA, MENDEHO, AND MOONLIGHT

DETECTIVES AND CADAVERS

A HEART FOR LUCRETIA

BALZAC'S WAR

Chapter I

Chapter II

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jeff VanderMeer

Copyright Page

I

NICHOLAS

тАЬMe, I was at the height of my powers . . .тАЭ

тАФGiant Sand



CHAPTER 1
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 clich├й performed with cardboard and painted sparkly colors to
disguise the empty centerтАФthe hole.

(That's mineтАФthe words. I specialize in holoart, 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 Ven
issтАФlike 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 meтАФnot 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 under-level 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
omnipresent, omnieverything holovision.