"Ellison-SunkenCathedral" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

deconstructed, unbuilt, as his molecules were being transported here -- to this
place of the lake pool and exquisite diamond-bright light and gently rippling
water that seemed heavier than he remembered water to be, seemed able to hold
him higher in its totality than he remembered water was able. It was not that he
felt lighter, more buoyant, just that the water was more reliable, more
fatherly, gentler. He trusted it more than when be had been--

-- had been where? Had been in the water beyond Andros Island? Had been in the
North Atlantic Ocean? Had been on the planet Earth? Had been in the year and the
month and the day on the calendar in his office back at the Sonar station? Had
been in his right mind, his right-brain mind? Where he had been: that much he
knew. Where he was now, what had happened to bring him to this new place, by
what impossible transport . . . he could not begin to fathom. The diving suit,
too, was gone. Its atoms dispersed at the checkout counter of
transmogrification. Stale-dated. Roundfiled. Recycled. Where the hell am I?

He looked across the crimson lake and saw ships.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of ships. Boats, craft, vessels of all sizes and
periods and origins. Arab dhows and Gallic currachs, Greek triremes and
balsa-wood PT boats, Canton delta lorcha and lateen-sailed Portuguese trawlers.
Whalers, warships, feluccas and frigates; hydrofoils, hagboats, pinnaces and
Pechili junks. Siamese lug-sails, brigantines, galeasses, Hanseatic League cogs,
sixty-oared papyrus galleys, Norse drakkars and dragon-prowed Viking longships
called the Oseberg ship. Barques, yawls, packet boats, gigarettes, freighters,
cabin cruisers, sampans, windjammers and luxury liners; Turkish tchektirme,
Greek sacoleva, Venetian trabaccolo, Levantine caique, and the German U-1065
pigboat alleged to have been sunk by R.A.F. Mosquitos in the Kattegat. Sailing
ships that were little more than rough-hewn logs lashed into the shape of a raft
with lianas, and twin-hulled catamarans of titanium and PVC pipe. The lake pool,
harbor of last resort, Sargasso of lost ships, was filled with the oceangoing
detritus of ten thousand years.

Yet it was hardly jammed. It seemed endless in its capacity to hold the
castaways of the shipping lanes, but the lake was spacious and only dotted with
a shape here, a bobbing four-masted brigantine there. Dennis Lanfear, treading
water, turned slowly, looking and looking amazed at the bizarre optical illusion
made by a storehouse overflowing . . . that remained capacious and expectant.

He turned and turned . . . and saw the city.

It rose from the very edge of the lake pool. Slanting up as softly blue and gray
as psalms ascending to Heaven, it was massive, enthralling, breathtaking in the
complexity of its segmented faces. Walls so high they dizzyingly ran to a sky
that could not be seen in the misty upper reaches. Walls that abutted at right
angles -- yet formed no central square. Walls that seemed ancient, yet downy
with the breath of first birth. The cave dwellings of the Anasazi, the
prehistorical hive dwellings of slope-browed pre-men, the filing cabinets for
gothamites gone eternally condo . . . this was the City indeed, the City
supreme. It towered over the harbor, and at first Lanfear saw no hint of human