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

Aaron & Son would never miss a cashmere shawl. Perhaps their
account-engines would, when they tallied up, but the loss couldn't hurt
them; their shopping-palace was too big and too rich. All those Greek
columns, chandeliers of Irish crystal, a million mirrors--room after gilded
room, stuffed with rubber riding boots and French-milled soap,
walking-sticks, umbrellas, cutlery, locked glass cases crammed with
silver-plate and ivory brooches and lovely wind-up golden music-boxes . . .
And this was only one of a dozen in a chain. But for all of that, she knew,
Aaron's wasn't truly smart, not a gentry place.
But couldn't you just do anything with money in England, if you were
clever? Someday Mr. Aaron, a whiskery old merchant Jew from Whitechapel,
would have a lordship, with a steam-gurney waiting at the curb and his own
coat of arms on the coachwork. The Rad Parliament wouldn't care that Mr.
Aaron was no Christian. They'd given Charles Darwin a lordship, and he said
that Adam and Eve were monkeys.
The liftman, gotten up in a Frenchified livery, drew the rattling brass
gate aside for her. Mick followed her in, his parcel tucked under his arm,
and then they were descending.
They emerged from Aaron's into Whitechapel jostle. While Mick checked a
street-map he took from his coat, she gazed up at the shifting letters that
ran the length of Aaron's frontage. A mechanical frieze, a slow sort of
kinotrope for Aaron's adverts, made all of little bits of painted wood,
clicking about each in turn, behind leaded sheets of bevel-glass. CONVERT
YOUR MANUAL PIANO, the jostling letters suggested, INTO A KASTNER'S PIANOLA.
The skyline west of Whitechapel was spikey with construction cranes,
stark steel skeletons painted with red lead against the damp. Older
buildings were furred with scaffolding; what wasn't being torn down, it
seemed, to make way for the new, was being rebuilt in its image. There was
a distant huffing of excavation, and a tremulous feeling below the
pavement, of vast machines cutting some new underground line.
But now Mick turned left, without a word, and walked away, his hat
cocked to one side, his checkered trouser-legs flashing under the long hem
of his greatcoat. She had to hurry to match his step. A ragged boy with a
numbered tin badge was sweeping mucky snow from the crossing; Mick tossed
him a penny without breaking stride and headed down the lane called Butcher
Row.
She caught up and took his arm, past red and white carcasses dangling
from their black iron hooks, beef and mutton and veal, and thick men in
their stained aprons crying their goods. London women crowded there in
scores, wicker baskets on their arms. Servants, cooks, respectable wives
with men at home. A red-faced squinting butcher lurched in front of Sybil
with a double handful of blue meat. "Hallo, pretty missus. Buy your
gentleman my nice kidneys for pie!" Sybil ducked her head and walked around
him.
Parked barrows crowded the curb, where costers stood bellowing, their
velveteen coats set off with buttons of brass or pearl. Each had his
numbered badge, though fully half the numbers were slang, Mick claimed, as
slang as the costers' weights and measures. There were blankets and baskets
spread on neatly chalked squares on the paving, and Mick was telling her of
ways the costers had to plump out shrunken fruit, and weave dead eels in