"Paul McAuley - The Secret of Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

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 Paul McAuley - The Secret of Life

PART ONE

LIFE ON EARTH

Shanghai, Chinese Democratic Union:

March 2, 2026

All human life is here.

It is almost midnight, yet dozens of barges still plough the black waters of the Huangpu Jiang, hazard
lights winking red and green, passing either side of streamlined robot cargo clippers that swing at anchor
in the midstream channel. The tall white cylinders of the clippers' rotary sails are fitfully illuminated by
fireworks bursting above a rock concert in an amphitheater on the Pudong shore, close to the minaret of
the Oriental Pearl TV Tower. Nets of white laser light flex against the dark sky. The howl of massed
guitars and the throaty roar of the audience carries over the river to Shanghai, where, along the
waterfront avenue of the Bund, beneath tiers of neon, crowds swirl past stalled lines of traffic.

Most of the old colonial department stores and banks have been torn down, replaced by skyscrapers with
organic facings like muscle fibers or wood grain seen under a microscope's lens, or coralline skins
fretted with porous knots and hollows and veins. The human crowds at their feet are like columns of ants
scurrying around the buttress roots of forest giants. People stream out of the Cathay Theater. Waiters in
starched white shirts move among the crowded tables of terrace cafes where roaring gas heaters keep out
the night's chill. Teenage police officers lounge sullenly at inter-sections, tugging at their white gloves
as they watch opposing streams of vehicles inch past with blaring horns and glaring head-lights. Huge
signs are flooded with new advertisements every twenty seconds. Corporate logos burn sleeplessly
inside glass-walled malls piled with electronics, silks, and exotic biotech.

Behind the Bund and the commercial sector, the gridded streets are narrower but no less crowded.
Traffic is jammed in a complex one-way system. Pedestrians and cyclists pour around lit-tle three-
wheeled trucks, bubble cars, the limos of high-ranking government officials or entrepreneurs or
gangsters. Electric scoot-ers tow trailers piled high with flat TV sets or melons or cartons of cigarettes.
Bars and clubs flaunt their wares in video loops cut to the hectic beat of slash funk. Hawkers thrust
animated adsheets into the hands of passersby. Stalls sell ramen or noodle soups, spices, tacky souvenirs,
bootleg spikes, cages of live birds, exotic tweaks. Here's an old woman tipping a handful of fish heads
into sesame oil smoking in a blackened wok. Here's a beggar with an extra head that lolls idiotically on
his left shoulder. Here's a crowd of shopgirls tripping along under a bouquet of colored paper um-
brellas. Tucked away in narrow alleyways are chop shops for stolen motorcycles, the offices of gray
biosurgeons and baby fanners, workshops where customized chips are hand-etched, traditional medicine
shops with dusty glass jars of bark or twigs or dried ber-ries, a shop selling cloned tiger penis and vat-
grown ivory.