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

‘Okay, my little chikadees.’ He slips a Little Thunderer between his
ice-cream pink lips, blows a mighty blast that sets even the letters up on the
hill reverberating. ‘Let’s go!’

Last census Alto California had a population in the region of thirty-five
million people. Looks like every last one of them, plus eleven satellite
channels, turned out this Fat Tuesday. The streets are canyons of sound
and colour, cheering voices, whistles, banners, streamers, balloons with the
faces of cartoon characters and football stars on them; it is high, high stuff,
higher than anything they ever sold in zip-loc plastic sachets back of Mr
Socks’ stall on Birimbao Plaza and the Glass Guitar snorts it down its
f-holes and it burns along the strings up Annunciato’s fingers and it is just
the edge, the promise of a wildness that could be if he is brave enough and
Ros’a’Jericho takes up the roar of the crowd and the beating of the bells
and the cymbals and slams them through her processors and La Baiana is
jigging and clapping his hands like he is in heaven and now the canyon
walls of the business district close in around you and funnel Tres Milagros
into the massive procession twenty kilometres long that is Carnival, a torrent
of life and sound and colour and music channelled between the twenty thirty
forty fifty storey high videowalls of the big Pacific Rim corporadas and the
people crowded twenty thirty forty fifty deep along the boulevards are so
close so pressing the sound of them is like a physical presence and
Ros’a’Jericho scoops it up and takes it apart and puts it back together again
and the glass guitar snorts it down and sends it burning up through your
fingers into your brain and you see with a sudden new light like the dawn
slanting through the win-dows of Our Lady Star of the Sea mission between
the end of one note and the next what it is that lies hidden within the
moonflower heart of the Glass Guitar, it is every great moment you ever
had listening to the radio in the heat of the night, it is dancing in the rain to
sound of accapella, it is rhinestone guitars playin’ live from Las Vegas on
the Sunday night satellite channels, all these and more, every great and true
and holy and profane moment whether you call it rock’n’roll or soul or
bossanova or blues or sambada and he realises now what he is to do, he
is not to hold it back, that was where he went wrong that time in the
Birimbao sambadrome, that was why the boy was killed, because he held
back and it struck out to be free, struck out blindly, in anger and hurt; he
opens himself to the thing in the guitar, draws it up into the heart of him and
he screams and the guitar screams as his eyes are opened to a new light
and he sees the faces on the videowalls change into the face of a woman
with a bowl of fruit on her head and a stealth bomber in spiked armour and a
dozen kabuki masks spinning in space and, last of all, a glass guitar rimmed
with lightning bolts.

Seu Guantanamera.
 And the Glass Guitar leaps beneath Annunciato’s fingers free at last
free at last dear God free at last and roars in heat and draws the rhythm of
the batteria and the master mix and the reality dub and the stamping of the
dancing feet and the thirty million voices plus eleven satellite channels into
one thing, one music which transcends music, that becomes something
brilliant and burning and beautiful and shit-scary that even the batteria falls