"China Mieville - The Tain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mieville China)

Months ago, perhaps in the moment of that interruption, a train had stalled on the bridge. It remained. It
looked quite unbroken: even its windows were whole. The driver's door hung open.

The man gripped the open door but did not look inside, did not run his hand over the instruments. He
hauled himself, with the door as a ladder, to the train's flat roof. And then he stood up, gripping his gun,
and looked.



His name was Sholl. He had been awake for three hours already that day, up and walking, and still he
had seen no one. From the roof of the train, the city seemed empty.

To his south was the rubble that had been Battersea Power Station. Without it, the skyline was
remarkable: a perpetual surprise. Sholl could see over the industrial park behind it -- the buildings there
much less damaged -- to a tract of housing that looked almost as it had before the war. On the north
shore, the Lister Hospital looked untouched, and the roofs of Pimlico were still sedate -- but fires were
burning, and trees of poisonous smoke grew over north London.

The river was clogged with wrecks. Besides the mouldering barges that had always been there jutted the
bows of police boats, and the decks and barrels of sunken gunships. Inverted tugs like rusting islands.
The Thames flowed slowly around these impediments.

Light's refusal to shimmer on its surface made the river matte as dried ink, overlaid on a cut-out of
London. Where the bridge's supports met the water, they disappeared into light and darkness.

Once, in a city seemingly deserted, Sholl would have explored, in fear and loneliness. But he had grown
disgusted with those feelings, and with the prurience that quickly mediated them. He walked north,
along the top of the train. He would follow the tracks down past the walls of London, into Victoria
station.

From some miles off, from the direction of South Kensington, came a high mewing sound. Sholl gripped
the shotgun. A multitude lifted from the distant streets, many thousands of indistinct bodies. They were
not birds. The flock did not move in avian curves, but with spastic jerks, changing speed and direction
with a suddenness birds could never manage. The things trilled and chattered, moving erratically south.

Sholl eyed them. They were animals, scavengers. Doves, they had been named, with heavy-handed
irony. They could hurt a person badly, or kill, but as Sholl had expected, they ignored him. The flock
passed over his head in unnerving motion. They were unclear.

Each dove was a pair of crossed human hands, linked by thumbs. Cupped palms and fingers fluttering in
preposterous motion. Sholl did not watch them. He was leaning out and staring into the Thames water
below him, below the doves, the water in which nothing was reflected.

file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/China%20Mieville%20-%20The%20Tain.txt (2 of 2)13-8-2005 23:12:49