"Paul J. McAuley & Kim Newman - In Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

stock exchange cores, he is King Scratch, Master Remix.

Seu Guantanamera, the one who, if this crazy old black man can be
believed, if anything that has happened these past twentysomething hours
can be believed, is the personal guardian and guide of Annunciato and his
glass guitar. He is Master of Harmony, Completer and Sustainer of the
quadrilateral of entities; his source and symbol is a glass guitar.

El Batador reverently picks up the Glass Guitar, wipes the scabs of
dried music from its wounds, hands it to Ros’a’Jericho, who shakes her
silver head - she cannot understand anything that is itself, not made from
other things remixed together - passes it back to Annunciato, like some
sacramental ganja. His fingers come and go, come and go, up and down
the silent frets.

‘Back in the time of the Black Star Liner,’ says El Batador, ‘when the
black people left for Ethiopia on that ship that was three miles long and two
miles wide and a mile high that sailed for forty years through every ocean in
the world, back then lived the greatest guitarist ever laid finger to fret. Bar
none. Seu Guantanamera. With those six strings he could make you cry
and laugh and die and feel like you had seen the face of God or something
even better. People said he was God, or something better, and they would
have made him God if he had let them, but he died trying out a new guitar, a
guitar like there had never been before. Made of glass, it was. Clear pure
and perfect crystal. And it killed him. An accident with the electronics. The
circuitry went live. He died instantly, up on stage in front of twenty thousand
people, in mid chord.

‘And then the legends started. Legends that his soul had passed into
the glass guitar, that whoever bought it would have no luck with it until it
passed into the hands of someone who had as much, or more, talent than
Seu Guantanamera, legends that when the time was right the trapped soul
would be released.’

And as the old black man says those words, Annunciato, who has
been thinking, yo, yo, ga, ga, suddenly feels the strings hum beneath his
fingers, like electricity like summer lightning in the hills. And he is much
much afraid.
 ‘Tell me,’ says El Batador, and it is as if all Tres Milagros Hill right up
to those crazy letters on the top is listening for Annunciato’s answer, ‘Tell
me, how did you find it?’

‘On a trash heap,’ says Annunciato, ‘on Birimbao Hill. One morning, I
went out, and there it was. It didn’t look like it was anybody’s. I taught myself
to play, day in, day out, every hour I could spare, I practised, so I could be
like the big guitarristos, better, even.’ But as he says these words, he
understands that they are true, and at the same time not true. They should
be reversed, It found Him, It taught Him. It made Him the best. There had
always been a sense of the hand of the angels about it, from the moment
he saw it twinkling from the shit and foam styrene burger boxes that bright