"William Gibson, Bruce Sterling "The difference engine"" - читать интересную книгу автора

WILLIAM GIBSON and BRUCE STERLING

THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE



FIRST ITERATION
The Angel of Goliad

Composite image, optically encoded by escort-craft of the trans-Channel
airship Lord Brunel: aerial view of suburban Cherbourg, October 14, 1905.
A villa, a garden, a balcony.
Erase the balcony's wrought-iron curves, exposing a bath-chair and its
occupant. Reflected sunset glints from the nickel-plate of the chair's
wheel-spokes.
The occupant, owner of the villa, rests her arthritic hands upon fabric
woven by a Jacquard loom.
These hands consist of tendons, tissue, jointed bone. Through quiet
processes of time and information, threads within the human cells have
woven themselves into a woman.
Her name is Sybil Gerard.
Below her, in a neglected formal garden, leafless vines lace wooden
trellises on whitewashed, flaking walls. From the open windows of her
sickroom, a warm draft stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing
scents of coal-smoke, jasmine, opium.
Her attention is fixed upon the sky, upon a silhouette of vast and
irresistible grace--metal, in her lifetime, having taught itself to fly. In
advance of that magnificence, tiny unmanned aeroplanes dip and skirl
against the red horizon.
Like starlings, Sybil thinks.
The airship's lights, square golden windows, hint at human warmth.
Effortlessly, with the incomparable grace of organic function, she imagines
a distant music there, the music of London: the passengers promenade, they
drink, they flirt, perhaps they dance.
Thoughts come unbidden, the mind weaving its perspectives, assembling
meaning from emotion and memory.
She recalls her life in London. Recalls herself, so long ago, making
her way along the Strand, pressing past the crush at Temple Bar. Pressing
on, the city of Memory winding itself about her--till, by the walls of
Newgate, the shadow of her father's hanging falls . . .
And Memory turns, deflected swift as light, down another byway--one
where it is always evening . . .
It is January 15, 1855.
A room in Grand's Hotel, Piccadilly.

One chair was propped backward, wedged securely beneath the door's
cut-glass knob. Another was draped with clothing: a woman's fringed
mantelet, a mud-crusted skirt of heavy worsted, a man's checked trousers
and cutaway coat.