"Tony Daniel - The Valley of the Gardens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniel Tony)

The desert had broken through in multiple places in spear points of sand and
creosote seedlings. He had more to do than he’d first anticipated. It sur-prised him.
It alarmed him. In fact, his anxiety over the fence had worked its way into his
dreams—and even into a couple of his nightmares.

He was reminded of fence gaps whether he was working the line or not. He’d
be down below in the valley at some other task and suddenly hear the knowing
screech of a desert grackle or be startled by the bounce and buzz of one of the
enormous variegated grasshoppers blown into the valley by the winter westerlies in
Cangarriga’s northern hemisphere and feel shock, betrayal, by the fence. It was
supposed to keep such things out—and away from his crops. At odd moments, he
found himself suddenly fantasizing that a gap in the fence had let in bad code and his
upper fields were being sub-verted and ruined. He’d even start quickly in their
direction until he came to his senses and realized he’d only been daydreaming.
Dayworrying. He’d had a real dream one night featuring the valley as well. Every
surface in it had glowed with a sickly yellow infection—the rosemary, sage, and pine
covered in a tacky, malfunctioning secretion. And he’d had several dim but
trouble-some nightmares featuring himself leaving, running through a break in the
fence like a madman and disappearing (in the dreams, he was both observer and
insane escapee) into the shimmer of the Extremadura vastness.

He couldn’t be sure if it was himself or the valley itself that was bringing on
the anxiety. Like the fence, Mac was deeply intertwined with the land in ways seen
and unseen. But when he checked with other farmers, and with the villagers
downvalley in Sant Llorenz, no one had noticed much different.

Maybe it was all just him.

In what was ancient custom while fence mending, he’d been joined on most
days by a Faller nomad, a representative of his neighbors—his sometime enemies
and trading partners on the desert side. The Faller walked with him and watched Mac
as he worked, allegedly there to be sure that Mac kept to the line and did not cheat
the fence outward, but mostly attempting to talk Mac into trading off-planet tech for
their desert gleanings. Whatever its purpose, this tradition served to keep the line
stationary. For a fence nearly fifty thousand years old, one inch of movement for
every season of fence-mending would lop off a great deal of new land, or lose a
large field to wildness if pushed in the opposite direction.

For his part, Mac wanted not a speck of the Extremadura. It wasn’t just
desert, it was wild desert—never terraformed, but created as a battlefield, its source
code hopelessly jangled, belligerent and untamed. Its jack-rock was still tainted with
nox, the nanotech leavings of that war, never completely defanged. In addition, the
Extremadura teemed with every manner of beast, all of them possessing a crazy
sentience of sorts emanating from the jack-rock below. Yet people lived there.
Nomads like Theresa.

Theresa had come on his second week working the fence, after her brother,
the official watcher, had suffered some sort of injury and had to convalesce. She
was a daughter of the Faller’s clan that roamed this portion of the Extremadura,