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

Then he was gone, taking long, ground-eating strides away from me down the docks, without even a
good-bye or a chance to thank him, as if I was somehow tainted, somehow no good. It made me sad. It
made me mad. Because I've always said Shadrach was Off, even when Nicola dated him.

Shadrach and Nicola. I've had relationships, but never the Big One. Those loving young lovers strolling
down by the drug-free zones, those couples coupling in the shadow of the canals, they don't know what
it is to be desperately in love, and perhaps even Nicola didn't know. But I thought Shadrach would die
when she left him. I thought he would curl up and die. He should have died, except that he found Quin,
and somehow Quin raised him up from the dead.

CHAPTER 2

What does Quin do, you ask? (As if you have the right to ask questions knee deep in garbage. But
you've asked so I'll tell you:) Quin makes critters. He makes critters that once existed but don't now
(tigers, sheep, bats, elephants, dolphins, albatrosses, seagulls, armadillos, dusky seaside sparrows) or
critters that never existed except in myth, flat media, or holos (Jabberwocks, Grinches, Ganeshas,
Puppeteers, Gobblesnorts, Snarks) or critters that just never existed at all until Quin created them
(beetleworms, eelgoats, camelapes).

But the best thing he doesтАФthe Liveliest Art of all, for my purposesтАФis to improve on existing critters.
Like meerkats with opposable thumbs. His meerkats are like the old, old Stradi-various violins, each
perfect and each perfectly different. Only the rich could procure them, through influence mostly, not
money, because Quin didn't work for money, it was said, but for favors. Though no one could guess
what favors, and at what cost. Rumor had it Quin had started out assisting state-sponsored artificial
pregnancies, before the fall of government, but no one knew anything concrete about Quin's past.

So I daydreamed about meerkats after Shadrach left me. I imagined wonderful, four-foot-tall meerkats
with shiny button eyes and carrot noses and cool bipedal movement and can-I-help-you smiles.
Meerkats that could do kitchen work or mow the atrophiturf in your favorite downtown garden plot.
Even wash clothes. Or, most importantly, coldcock a pick dick and bite his silly weiner off.

This is the principal image of revenge I had branded into my mind quite as violently as those awful nuevo
Westerns which, as you have no doubt already guessed, are my one weakness. тАЬAh, yessirree, Bob,
gonna rope me a meerkat, right after I defend my lady's honor and wrassle with this here polar bear.тАЭ I
mean, come on! No wonder it was so hard to sell my holoart before the pick dicks stole it.

But as I headed down the alley, which looked quite dead-endish later that nightтАФhaving just had a bout
of almost-fisticuffs (more cuffs than fisties) with a Canal District barkeepтАФI admit to nervousness. I
admit to sweat and trembling palms. The night was darker than darkтАФwait, listen: the end of the world
is night; that's mine, a single-cell haikuтАФand the sounds from the distant bright streets only faintly
echoed down from the loom 'n' doom buildings. (Stink of garbage, too, much like this place.)

As I stepped through the holographтАФa perfect rendition that spooked me goodтАФand came under the
watchful I's in the purple-lit sign, QUIN'S SHANGHAI CIRCUS, I did the thrill-in-the-spine bit. It
reminded me of when I was a kid (again) and I saw an honest-to-greatness circus, with a real sparrow
doing tricks on a high wire, even a regular dog all done up in bows. I remember embarrassing my dad by
pointing when the dog shat on the circus ring floor and saying, тАЬLook, Dad, look! Something's coming
out the back end!тАЭ Like a prize, maybe? I didn't know better. (Hell, I didn't even know my own dad
wasn't real.) Even then the genetic toys I played withтАФRuff the Rooster with the cold eyes I thought