"Colin Greenland - Take Back Plenty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenland Colin)

tag and step through the gate. Just her luck to get an Eladeldi.
She knew what he was going to say next as soon as he opened his little purple mouth.
“Records show registratiod ob debectib axis lock crystal,” he said. “Two budths ago.”
“Yes,” said Tabitha.
“Not yet reblaced,” he observed.
“No,” she said. “That’s why I’ve got to see a man about a job.”
But he still had to print out yet another copy of the Capellan regulations about acceptable levels of
degradation on axis lock crystals before he let her through the gate.
She stuffed the printout into her bag, where — somewhere — three other copies were already
lurking, and looked at the time.
“Shit,” she said.
The commercial terminal was closed for some kind of police operation. Tabitha found herself being
diverted down a long underground tunnel to the civil concourse. It was swarming with people. Spacers in
livery jostled with porters, human and drone. Eager evangelists pressed prophecies of the imminent Total
Merge into the paws, fans and hands of glazed-looking tourists. Holos for local businesses, net stations
and archaeological attractions competed for attention, whooping and gyrating on their daises. The
hubbub was even more deafening than usual.
Of course: it was carnival.
Tabitha’s headset suddenly locked into an ambient channel and began to tinkle with tinny salsa.
Irritated, she snatched out the earpiece and let the set dangle round her neck. She had to get a move on if
she was going to make it to the city before noon. Hoisting her bag, she sidestepped a cargo float, waded
through a crowd of squabbling Perks and elbowed between two Alteceans and a city guide they were
trying to haggle. Stepping high in the light gravity and brandishing the bag before her, she ploughed her
way out into the open air.
Outside, it was dusty and cold. Grit whirled in the biting desert winds. Half-naked children with slit
eyes and matchstick limbs worked the emerging crowd with grim efficiency. Tabitha Jute pulled up the
collar of her old foil jacket and strode off past the concession stalls, looking for transport.
The queues for air taxis would be impossible. She took the slidewalk to the canal. The queues there
were just as bad. Fortunately most of the tourists were after a robot hover, which she couldn’t afford
anyway. Then - a stroke of luck - she cut in front of a white family still cooing over the colour of the
water, and managed to sling her bag into an arriving boat.
“The Moebius Strip,” she called.
The cries of the annoyed sightseers dying away behind them, they left the wharf and slid off
downstream. Tabitha sat in the stern and watched the olive groves and sponge gardens on either bank
swiftly give way to shipyards, silica refineries and air plants. In the distance for a moment the complicated
towers of Schiaparelli rose. Then coral pink walls of rock closed about them as they took the deep cut
into Wells.
“Here for carnival?” the driver asked Tabitha, in tones of boredom and resentment which didn’t
lessen when Tabitha said no. She was a Vespan, brooding with hostile humility, like all of them. The
atmosphere had mottled her long cheeks with brown blotches. She complained about the cold.
“It was better before they knock the dome down,” she said. “Was you ever here when we had the
dome?”
“Before my time,” said Tabitha.
“We had good warm then,” said the driver. “Then they knock the dome down. They say they gone
put up solar.” Her mobile features squeezed themselves around sulkily. “They never. They still argue,
argue, who gone pay.”
She lifted her elbows. She looked like a bundle of spoiled green peppers in a brown felt overcoat.
Her glossy lobes were withered and shrunken, the soft pouches of her face sagging in permanent despair.
Tabitha wondered how long the woman had been scratching a living on the waterways, complaining to
uncaring passengers, never quite summoning up the cash or the strength to take the long haul home.