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

They were called slow birds because they flew through the airтАФat the
stately pace of three feet per minute.
They looked a little like birds, too, though only a little. Their tubular
metal bodies were rounded at the head and tapering to a finned point at
the tail, with two stubby wings midway. Yet these wings could hardly have
anything to do with suspending their bulk in the air; the girth of a bird
was that of a horse, and its length twice that of a man lying full length.
Perhaps those wings controlled orientation or trim.
In color they were a silvery grey; though this was only the color of their
outer skin, made of a soft metal like lead. Quarter of an inch beneath this
coating their inner skins were black and stiff as steel. The noses of the
birds were all scored with at least a few scrape marks due to encounters
with obstacles down the years; slow birds always kept the same height
above groundтАФunderbelly level with a man's shouldersтАФand they would
bank to avoid substantial buildings or mature trees, but any frailer
obstructions they would push on through. Hence the individual patterns of
scratches. However, a far easier way of telling them apart was by the
graffiti carved on so many of their flanks; initials entwined in hearts,
dates, place names, fragments of messages. These amply confirmed how
very many slow birds there must be in allтАФsomething of which people
could not otherwise have been totally convinced. For no one could keep
track of a single slow bird. After each one had appearedтАФover hill, down
dale, in the middle of a pasture or half way along a village streetтАФit would
fly onward slowly for any length of time between an hour and a day,
covering any distance between a few score yards and a full mile. And
vanish again. To reappear somewhere else unpredictably: far away or close
by, maybe long afterwards or maybe soon.
Usually a bird would vanish, to reappear again.
Not always, though. Half a dozen times a year, within the confines of
this particular island country, a slow bird would reach its journey's end.
It would destroy itself, and all the terrain around it for a radius of two
and a half miles, fusing the landscape instantly into a sheet of glass. A flat,
circular sheet of glass. A polarized, limited zone of annihilation. Scant
yards beyond its rim a person might escape unharmed, only being
deafened and dazzled temporarily.
Hitherto no slow bird had been known to explode so as to overlap an
earlier sheet of glass. Consequently many towns and villages clung close to
the borders of what had already been destroyed, and news of a fresh glass
plain would cause farms and settlements to spring up there. Even so, the
bulk of people still kept fatalistically to the old historic towns. They
assumed that a slow bird wouldn't explode in their midst during their own
lifetimes. And if it did, what would they know of it? Unless the glass
happened merely to bisect a townтАФin which case, once the weeping and
mourning was over, the remaining citizenry could relax and feel secure.
True, in the long term the whole country from coast to coast and from
north to south would be a solid sheet of glass. Or perhaps it would merely
be a checkerboard, of circles touching circles: a glass mosaic. With what
in between? Patches of desert dust, if the climate dried up due to
reflections from the glass. Or floodwater, swampland. But that day was