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

distance glamoring its beauty.
"How far are we planning to go?" Donna asked apprehensively.
"Don't be a weak sister," Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.
The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were
missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock
were walnut-sized lumps of rust.
Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass
and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.
Hours passed. Donna's feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she
refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky,
and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap-grab-tug on the rail.
She felt sweaty and miserable.
Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the
French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge
into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy
their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history's first great failure in weather control.
This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the
same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be
somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting
something she was not. Last year in Germany when she'd gone out with that local boy with the Alfa
Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything's going to be
different now. But no.
Nothing ever changed.
"Heads up!" Russ said. "There's some steps missing here!" He leaped, and the landing gonged
hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.
Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back
beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she'd probably miss the stairs altogether.
She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was
connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky
wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall
into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or
would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to
strangle in a sea of air? "Come on Donna!" Piggy shouted up at her. "Don't be a pussy!"
"Russ—" she said quaveringly.
But Russ wasn't looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. "Don't push the
lady," he said. "We can go on by ourselves."
Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart
scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally
lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It
hurt like hell, and at first she feared she'd pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the
side of her head with his knuckles. "I knew you could do it, you wimp."
Donna knocked away his arm. "Okay, wise-ass. How are you expecting to get us back up?"
The smile disappeared from Piggy's face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully
upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. "I—I mean,
I—"
 "Don't worry about it," Russ said impatiently. "We'll think of something." He started down again.
It wasn't natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to
descend the stairway. It was like the time he'd brought his father's revolver to school along with a story
about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. "Three times!" he'd said proudly.
He'd had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn't the slightest notion then or now how she