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

with live. She smiled at the pleasure he seemed to take in knowing such
things, while hawkers yelped about their brooms and soap and candles, and a
scowling organ-grinder cranked, two-handed, at his symphony machine,
filling the street with a fast springy racket of bells, piano-wire, and
steel.
Mick stopped beside a wooden trestle-table, kept by a squint-eyed widow
in bombazine, the stump of a clay pipe protruding from her thin lips.
Arrayed before her were numerous vials of some viscous-looking substance
Sybil took to be a patent medicine, for each was pasted with a blue slip of
paper bearing the blurred image of a savage red Indian. "And what would
this be, mother?" Mick inquired, tapping one red-waxed cork with a gloved
finger.
"Rock-oil, mister," she said, relinquishing the stem of her pipe, "much
as they call Barbados tar." Her drawling accent grated on the ear, but
Sybil felt a pang of pity. How far the woman was from whatever outlandish
place she'd once called home.
"Really," Mick asked, "it wouldn't be Texian?"
" 'Healthful balm,' " the widow said, " 'from Nature's secret spring,
the bloom of health and life to man will bring.' Skimmed by the savage
Seneca from the waters of Pennsylvania's great Oil Creek, mister. Three
pennies the vial and a guaranteed cure-all." The woman was peering up at
Mick now with a queer expression, her pale eyes screwed tight in nests of
wrinkles, as though she might recall his face. Sybil shivered.
"Good day to you, then, mother," Mick said, with a smile that somehow
reminded Sybil of a vice detective she'd known, a sandy little man who
worked Leicester Square and Soho; the Badger, the girls had called him.
"What is it?" she asked, taking Mick's arm as he turned to go. "What is
it she's selling?"
"Rock-oil," Mick said, and she caught his sharp glance back at the
hunched black figure. "The General tells me it bubbles from the ground, in
Texas . . . "
Sybil was curious. "Is it a proper cure-all, then?"
"Never mind," he said, "and here's an end to chat." He was glancing
bright-eyed down the lane. "I see one, and you know what to do."
Sybil nodded, and began to pick her way through the market-crowd toward
the man Mick had seen. He was a ballad-seller, lean and hollow-cheeked, his
hair long and greasy under a tall hat wrapped in bright polka-dot fabric.
He held both his arms bent, hands knotted as if in prayer, the sleeves of
his rumpled jacket heavy with long rustling quires of sheet-music.
" 'Railway to Heaven,' ladies and gents," the ballad-seller chanted, a
veteran patterer. " 'Of truth divine the rails are made, and on the Rock of
Ages laid; the rails are fixed in chains of love, firm as the throne of God
above.' Lovely tune and only tuppence, miss."
"Do you have "The Raven of San Jacinto'?" Sybil asked.
"I can get that, I can get it," the seller said. "And what's that
then?"
"About the great battle in Texas, the great General?"
The ballad-seller arched his brows. His eyes were blue and crazily
bright, with hunger, perhaps, or religion, or gin. "One of your Crimea
generals then, a Frenchy, this Mr. Jacinto?"