"George Alec Effinger - City On Sand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

In Europe, there were only memories of great cultures.
Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, England, Carbba, and Germany
had all seized control of the world's course and the
imagination of the human race at one time or another. But
now these great powers of the past were drifting into a
cynical old age, where decadence and momentary pleasures
replaced the drive for dominance and national superiority. In
Asia, the situation was even worse. The Russias struggled
pettily among themselves, expending the last energies of a
once-proud nation in puerile bickerings. China showed signs
of total degeneration, having lost its immensely rich heritage
of art and philosophy while clinging to a ruthless creed that
crushed its hopeless people beneath a burden of mock-
patriotism. Breulandy was the only vibrant force east of the
Caucasus Mountains; still, no observer could tell what that
guarded land might do. Perhaps a Breulen storm would spill
out across the continent, at least instilling a new life force in
the decaying states. But from Breulandy itself came no word,
no hint, as though the country had bypassed its time of
ascendancy to settle for a weary and bitter mediocrity.
Of the rest of the world there was nothing to be said. The
Americas still rested as they had in the few centuries since
their discovery: huge parklike land masses, populated by
savages, too distant, too worthless, too impractical to bother
about. None of the crumbling European governments could
summon either the leadership or the financial support to
exploit the New World. The Scandinavian lands were inhabited
by skin-clad brutes scarcely more civilized than the American
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 The City on the Sand
by George Alec Effinger


cannibals. Farther east, beyond the teeming Chinese shores,
between Asia and the unexplored western reaches of the
Americas, no one was quite certain just what existed and
what was only myth. Perhaps the island continent of Lemarry
waited with its untold riches and beautiful copper spires.
And then, lastly, there was Africa. One city sat alone on its
fiery sands. One city, filled with refugees and a strange
mongrel population, guarded that massive continent. Beyond
that single city, built in some forgotten age by an unknown
people for unimaginable purposes, beyond the high wooden
gates that shut in the crazy heat and locked in the citizens,
there was only death. Without water, the continent was
death. Without shade, the parching sharaq winds were death.
Without human habitation, the vast three thousand miles of