"Michael Swanwick - The Edge of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

A shredded net waved forlornly from a basketball hoop set up by the loading dock.
There was a section of hurricane fence down. They scrambled through.
As they cut across the grounds, a loud whine arose from within the factory building. Down the way
another plant lifted its voice in a solid wham-wham-wham as rhythmic and unrelenting as a headache.
One by one the factories shook themselves from their midday drowse and went back to work. "Why do
they locate these things along the Edge?" Donna asked.
"It's so they can dump their chemical waste over the Edge," Russ explained. "These were all erected
before the Emir nationalized the culverts that the Russian Protectorate built."
Behind the factory was a chest-high concrete wall, rough-edged and pebbly with the slow erosion
of cement. Weeds grew in clumps at its foot. Beyond was nothing but sky.
Piggy ran ahead and spat over the Edge. "Hey, remember what Nixon said when he came here? It
is indeed a long way down. What a guy!"
Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky gray, intensifying at the focal point to
dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her
eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and
nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn't
expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls,
geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the
postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she
wondered what he saw.
"Hey, look what I found!" Piggy whooped. "It's a stairway!"
They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down
the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he'd
impressed himself, Piggy said, "What do you suppose is down there?"
"Only one way to find out, isn't there?" Russ said.

Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the
rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by
time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had
been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail: JURGEN BIN SCHEISSKOPF. MOTLEY
CRUE. DEATH TO SATAN AMERICA IMPERIALIST. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was
filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard.
The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.
"You ever had fugu? Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, "It's Japanese poisonous
blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die
every year. It's considered a great delicacy."
"Nothing tastes that good," Russ said.
"It's not the flavor," Piggy said enthusiastically. "It's the poison. Properly prepared, see, there's a
very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers
turn cold. Numb. That's how you know you're having the real thing. That's how you know you're living
right on the edge."
"I'm already living on the edge," Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.
A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as
they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a
scattering of carbonized spark plugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had
to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. "Sure is a lot of crap here," he observed. The landing
smelled faintly of urine.
"It'll get better farther down," Russ said. "We're still near the top, where people can come to get
drunk after work." He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the
industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist,