"Michael Swanwick - Stations of the Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

STATIONS OF THE TIDE
by MICHAEL SWANWICK (1991)


[VERSION 1.1 (August 22 2005). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute. In two text passages some content seems to be missing. These positions
have been marked *** MISSING PAGE? ***.]



For my mother,
Mrs. John Francis Swanwick,
With much love


Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to David Hartwell for suggesting where to look, Stan Robinson for the
gingerbread-maddrake trick, Tim Sullivan and Greg Frost for early comments and Greg Frost
again for designing the briefcase's nanotechnics, Gardner Dozois for chains of the sea and for
teaching the bureaucrat how to survive, Marianne for insights into bureaucracy, Bob Walters for
dino parts, Alice Guerrant for whale wallows and other Tidewater features, Sean for the game of
Suicide, Don Keller for nominal assistance, Jack and Jeanne Dann for the quote from Bruno,
which I took from their hotel room when they weren't looking, and Giulio Camillo for his memory
theater, here expanded to a palace; Camillo was one of the most famous men of his century, a
thought which should give us all pause. Any book's influences are too numerous to mention, but
riffs lifted from C. L. Moore, Dylan Thomas, Brian Aldiss, Ted Hughes, and Jamaica Kincaid are
too blatant to pass unacknowledged. This novel was written under a Challenge Grant from the M.
C. Porter Endowment for the Arts.


1. The Leviathan in Flight

The bureaucrat fell from the sky.
For an instant Miranda lay blue and white beneath him, the icecaps fat and ready to melt, and then he
was down. He took a highspeed across the stony plains of the Piedmont to the heliostat terminus at Port
Richmond, and caught the first flight out. The airship Leviathan lofted him across the fall line and over
the forests and coral hills of the Tidewater. Specialized ecologies were astir there, preparing for the
transforming magic of the jubilee tides. In ramshackle villages and hidden plantations people made their
varied provisions for the evacuation.
The Leviathan's lounge was deserted. Hands clasped behind him, the bureaucrat stared moodily out
the stern windows. The Piedmont was dim and blue, a storm front on the horizon. He imagined the falls,
where fish-hawks hovered on rising thermals and the river Noon cascaded down and lost its name.
Below, the Tidewater swarmed with life, like blue-green mold growing magnified in a petri dish. The
thought of all the mud and poverty down there depressed him. He yearned for the cool, sterile
environments of deep space.
Bright species of color floated on the brown water, coffles of houseboats being towed upriver as the
haut-bourgeois prudently made for the Port Richmond incline while the rates were still low. He touched a
window control and the jungle leaped up at him, misty trees resolving into individual leaves. The
heliostat's shadow rippled along the north bank of the river, skimming lightly over mud flats, swaying