"Ian Watson - Slow Birds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

He sat and thought of his mother. Maybe she would grow alarmed when
he didn't come home. Maybe she would go out and rouse Uncle John . . .
And maybe she had gone to bed already.
But maybe she would wake in the night and glance into his room and
send help. With fierce concentration he tried to project thoughts and
images of himself at her, two miles away.
An hour wore on, then two; or so he supposed from the moving of the
moon-crescent. He wished he could slump forward and sleep. That might
be best; then he wouldn't know anything. He still felt drunk enough to pass
out, even with his face pressed against metal. But he might easily slide to
one side or the other in his sleep.
How could his mother survive a double loss? It seemed as though a
curse had descended on the Babbidge family. But of course that curse had
a human name; and the name was Max Tarnover. So for a while Jason
damned him and imagined retribution by all the villagers of Atherton. A
bloody feud. Cottages burnt. Perhaps a rape. Deaths even. No Mayday
festival ever again.
But would Sam and Ned speak up? And would Atherton folk be
sufficiently incensed, sufficiently willing to destroy the harmony of the five
villages in a world where other things were so unsure? Particularly as
some less than sympathetic soul might say that Jason, Sam, and Ned had
started it all.
Jason was so involved in imagining a future feud between Atherton and
Tuckerton that he almost forgot he was astride a slow bird. There was no
sense of motion, no feeling of going anywhere. When he recollected where
he was, it actually came as a shock.
He was riding a bird.
But for how long?
It had been around, what, six hours now? A bird could stay for a whole
day. In which case he had another eighteen hours left to be rescued in. Or
if it only stayed for half a day, that would take him through to morning.
Just.
He found himself wondering what was underneath the metal skin of the
bird. Something which could turn five miles of landscape into a sheet of
glass, certainly. But other things too. Things that let it ignore gravity.
Things that let it dodge in and out of existence. A brain of some kind,
even?
"Can you hear me, bird?" he asked it. Maybe no one had ever spoken to
a slow bird before.
The slow bird did not answer.
Maybe it couldn't, but maybe it could hear him, even so. Maybe it could
obey orders.
"Don't disappear with me on your back," he told it. "Stay here. Keep on
flying just like this."
But since it was doing just that already, he had no idea whether it was
obeying him or not.
"Land, bird. Settle down onto the glass. Lie still."
It did not. He felt stupid. He knew nothing at all about the bird. Nobody
did. Yet somewhere, someone knew. Unless the slow birds did indeed
come from God, as miracles, to punish. To make men God-fearing. But