"John Kessel - The Juniper Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

“Sounds like a boy thing,” she said. “If your mother finds out, you'll be in deep trouble.”
He smiled. “You'll never get to be an alpha female with that attitude, High-G. Mother would have
invented this club, if she'd thought of it.” He got up and went over to talk to Thabo.

God, she was so stupid! It was the beginning of Founders’ Week, and she had hoped Carey would be
her guide and companion through the carnival. She had worried all week what to wear. What a waste.
She'd blown it . She tugged on the green asymmetrically-sleeved shirt she had chosen so carefully to set
off her red hair.

Roz hung around the edges as Carey joked with the others, trying to laugh in the right places, feeling
miserably out of place. After they dressed, she left with Carey, Thabo, and Raisa for the festival. Yellow
triangular signs surrounded the pressure lock in the hallway linking the ice cavern to the lava tube. Roz
struggled to keep up with Carey who, like all of the kids born on the moon, was taller than Roz. Raisa
leaned on Thabo. Raisa had told Roz the day before that she was thinking about moving out and getting
her own apartment. Raisa was thirteen, six months younger than Roz.

The lava tube was as much as forty meters wide, thirty tall, and it twisted and turned, rose and fell,
revealing different vistas as they went along. Shops and apartments clung to the walls. Gardens grew
along the nave beneath heliostats that transformed light transmitted from the surface during the lunar day
into a 24-hour cycle. Unless you went outside you could forget whether it was day or night out on the
surface.

Now it was “night.” As they entered the crater from the lava tube, the full extent of the colony was
spread out before them. The crater was nearly two kilometers in diameter. Even in one-sixth G, the dome
was a triumph of engineering, supported by a 500-meter tall central steel and glass spire. Roz could
hardly believe it, but the school legend was that Carey had once climbed the spire in order to spray paint
the name of a girl he liked on the inside of the dome.

Above, the dome was covered with five meters of regolith to protect the inside from radiation, and
beneath the ribbed struts that spread out from the spire like an umbrella's, the interior surface was a
screen on which could be projected a daytime sky or a nighttime starfield. Just now thousands of bright
stars shone down. Mars and Jupiter hung in bright conjunction high overhead.

From the west and south sides of the crater many levels of balconied apartments overlooked the interior.
Most of the crater floor was given over to agriculture, but at the base of the spire was Sobieski Park, the
main meeting ground for the colony's 2500 inhabitants. An elaborate fountain surrounded the tower.
There was an open-air theater. Trees and grass, luxuriantly irrigated in a display of conspicuous water
consumption, spread out from the center.

Roz and the others climbed down the zigzag path from the lava tube and through the farmlands to the
park. Beneath strings of colored lights hung in the trees, men and women danced to the music of a drum
band. Naked revelers wove their way through the crowd. Both sexes wore bright, fragrant ribbons in
their hair. A troupe performed low-gravity acrobatics on the amphitheater stage. Little children ran in and
out of the fountains, while men and women in twos and threes and every combination of sexes leaned in
each other's arms. On the shadowed grass, Roz watched an old man and a young girl lying together, not
touching, leaning heads on elbows, speaking in low voices with their faces inches apart. What could they
possibly have to say to each other? Thabo and Raisa faded off into the dancers around the band, and
Roz was alone with Carey. Carey brought her a flavored ice and sat down on the grass beside her. The
drum band was making a racket, and the people were dancing faster now.