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

silent and the sambaderos and sambaderas stop in mid wiggle, mid
shimmy to turn and stare at the wild things raving from the Glass Guitar and
there is only old mad El Batador banging on his plastic bucket and
Annunciato playing like no one, not even Seu Guantana-mera, ever played
six strings. It is joy. It is burning. It is pain. It is sex. It is every great and
noble thing, it is every rat-mean and wicked thing.

Higher. Higher. Higher. God save us, please, we cannot take much
more of this.

Higher. Higher.

God, please, no!

Higher . . .

And it ends.

And in the silence afterwards, thirty-five million people plus eleven
satellite channels hear clearly, unmistakably, enormous musical harmonics,
vaster than heaven, sound deep in the earth beneath their feet, like the
notes of a guitar buried in the centre of the earth, a guitar on which God
might jam with creation and the immense sound of it penetrates everything,
shakes everything streets buildings earth sky music heat and mind, shakes
them apart and in the space between is a light purer and brighter than any
light you have ever seen before.

Then the infinite sustained note dies away and the vision fades and
there is no God now only a cabañero punk holding the fused, shattered
fragments of a once beautiful glass guitar. But there is a new colour in
every one of the neon signs and holograms and videowalls, one that no one
has ever seen before but everyone immediately recognises as the colour
of street.

****

Ash Wednesday
Street.

The very heart and soul of sambada. One of those words that if you
have to look it up in a book, you will never never know what it means,
compadre.

****

When the great guitar at the centre of the earth sounded and the
Tucurombé were released, the world was never quite the same. When you
take a thing apart you can never put it back exactly the same way.
Sometimes worse. Sometimes better. Always different.