"Engines Of Light - 02 - Dark Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Dark Light


by Ken MacLeod


Rawliston Sprawls; from space it’s a grubby smudge, staining the glassy clarity
of the atmosphere along fifty kilometers of coastline. Biggest city on the
planet, home to a million or so human and other beings. Seven centuries old and
ever renewed; two centuries on from the biggest jolt it ever got; hours away
from another. It’s coming like an earthquake, coming like a runaway train,
coming like a lightspeed ship.


Stone froze in a cold sky. Around him, the glider’s struts creaked and its
cables sang. Hundreds of meters below his feet, the valley crawled. The Great
Vale stretched fifty or so kilometers before him and the same distance behind
him, its fields and towns, rivers and screes filling his sight. Through the
imperfect glass disks of his goggles he couldn’t quite see the mighty rockfalls
at either end that had, thousands of years ago, isolated the valley, but he
could just make out the distant gleam of the lake formed by Big River against
the natural dam at the eastern end. The midmorning sun glimmered on a series of
meanders in the river’s fat, lazy length along the valley’s broad floor. The
word for world is “valley,” he thought, and the word we use for ourselves is the
“flying people,” and the word the savages use for themselves is “people”. Oh,
but aren’t we a sophisticated and self-conscious Stone Age civilization!
He hung in a leather harness; the handles he gripped were made from the paired
humeri of an eagle; the fabric of the wing above him was of hand-woven silk
doped with alcohol-thinned pine resin; the craft’s singing structural members
were tensed bamboo, its cables vine and its stitching gut. Flint blades and bone
needles and wooden shuttles had been worn smooth in its manufacture; no metal
tool had touched it. No man, either; the whole process, from harvesting the raw
materials through building it to this, its test flight, was women’s work. It
would be bad luck for a man to touch it until it had been brought safely back
from its maiden flight and formally turned over. Stone wryly reflected on the
canny custom that assigned the rougher and riskier parts of glider
production—finding the eagle’s carcass, tapping the resin, testing the craft—to
women like him. He enjoyed the excitement and the solitude of these tasks,
though they would not have been so welcome without the background of days he
spent in the secure and companionable society of other women, working in long,
airy sheds with the needle or the loom, the glass saw or the stone knife.
He banked into an updraught and followed its upward spiral, almost to a level
with the mountain range on the western side of the valley. Below him, a pair of
wing-lizards skimmed the corries. Two black flecks, their wingspans almost a
third that of the glider. He kept a cautious eye on the upper slopes as he
drifted past them; sneaking across the skyline was the preferred approach route
for savage scouts and even raiding parties, and firearms were one product of the
metalworking peoples whose use none of the stoneworking peoples—including his
own—dared to disdain.
From his high vantage he could see the other aerial traffic of the valley: a few