"Ian Watson - Stalin's Teardrops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

"We must mend those ways. I believe there is much to rectify."
"Are you married, Grusha?"
"To our land, to the future, to my specialty."
"Which was, precisely?"
"The placing of names on maps. I assume you know Imhof's paper,
Die Anordnung der Namen in der Karte!"

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Stalin's Teardrops


"You read German?"
She nodded. "French and English too."
"My word!"
"I used my language skills on six years' duty in the DDR." Doing
what? Ah, not for me to enquire.
Her shoulders were narrow. How much weight could they bear?
Every so often she would hitch those shoulders carelessly with the air
of an energetic filly frustrated, till now, at not being given free rein to
dash forthтАФalong a prescribed, exactly measured track. There lay the
rub. Let her try to race into the ambiguous areas I had introduced!
I covered a yawn with my palm. "Yes, I know the Kraut's work. He
gave me some good ideas. Oh, there are so many means for making a
map hard to read. Nay, not merely misleading but incomprehensible!
Names play a vital role. Switch them all around, till only the contour
lines are the same as before. Interlace them, so that new place names
seem to emerge spontaneously. Set them all askew, so that the user
needs to turn the map around constantly till his head is in a spin.
Space the names out widely so that the map seems dotted with
unrelated letters like some code or acrostic. Include too many names,
so that the map chokes with surplus data."
Grusha stared at me, wide-eyed.
"And that," I said, "is only the icing on the cake."

Back in cartography I gave her a tour of the whole cake. In line with
the policy of clarity I intended to be transparently clear.
"Meet Andrey!" I announced in the first studio. "Andrey is our expert
with flexible curves and quills."
Red-headed, pock-marked Andrey glanced up from his glass drawing
table, floodlit from below. Lead weights covered in baize held sheets
of tracing paper in position. A trainee, Goldman, sat nearby carving
quills for Audrey's later inspection. At Goldman's feet a basket was
stuffed with an assortment of wing feathers from geese, turkeys,
ducks, and crows.
"Goose quills are supplest and wear longest," I informed Grusha,
though she probably knew. "Turkeys' are stiffer. Duck and crow is

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Stalin's Teardrops