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

Jack stalked away to keep from taking a swing at him.

The drum band was louder now, and so was the babble of the increasing crowd. He passed a group of
drunken singers. Near the amphitheater he saw one of the acrobat children staggering around in circles,
giggling. Jamira Tamlasdaughter, a friend of Eva's, tried to say hello, but he passed her by with a wave.
Jack's head throbbed. Beyond the trees that marked the border of Sobieski Park he followed a path
through fields of dry-lands soybeans, corn, potatoes. There was no one out here—most of the cousins
were at the festival now.

A kilometer later the path turned upward into the open lands of the crater slopes. Low, hardy blue-white
grass covered the ground. But the sound of the band still floated over the fields, and turning, Jack could
see the central tower lit by the colored lights. The foliage was side lit only by that distant light and the
projected starlight from the dome. Somewhere off to his left a night bird sang in a scraggly pine. He
turned his back to the festival.

It was an easy climb in one-sixth G, and when he hit the concrete rim of the crater that supported the
dome, he followed the perimeter road around toward the north airlock. He wanted out. The best refuge
he could think of was the biotech lab.

Because of the festival, the airlock was deserted. Jack took his pressure suit from his locker, suited up,
and cycled through the personnel lock. He passed through the radiation baffles to the surface.

Though it was night inside the dome, out here it was lunar afternoon. Harsh shadows lay beneath the
fields of solar collectors lining the road to the labs. Jack skipped along the tracked-up roadway, kicking
up a powder of fines. Over the throb of his headache he listened to the sound of his own breathing in his
earphones.

The fight he'd had with Roz was just like one of his final spats with Helen, full of buried resentments and
false assumptions. Roz's accusations stung because there was an element of truth in them. But Roz was
wrong to say Jack didn't care about her. From the moment of her birth Jack had committed himself to
Roz without reservation. Clearly he hadn't paid enough attention to her troubles, but he would do
anything to protect her.

Roz didn't understand that things were hard for Jack. “All men are boys,” the cousins said. In the case of
a jerk like Keikosson, he could admit the saying's truth. But it was as much a product of the way they
lived as of the men themselves. The women of the cousins indulged their boys their pleasures, kept them
adolescents far into their adulthood. It was a form of control-by-privilege.

Jack chafed at the way a male in the colony was seldom respected for his achievements, but rather for
who his mother and grandmother were. He hated the way women deferred to him once it got around that
he was Eva Maggiesdaughter's latest partner. He hated the sidelong glances he got about his relationship
to Roz. He was Roz's father. He was not anyone's boy.

The biotech labs were located in a bunker a kilometer north of Fowler. He entered the personnel lock,
air-blasted the fines from his suit and removed it. Like the airlock, the lab was deserted. He passed
through the greenhouse's rows of juniper and piñon seedlings to the soils lab. The temperature on his
latest batch of nematode soil was 30 centigrade. He drew on some boots, rolled back the cover on the
reservoir and waded into the loamy earth. The rich smell of nitrogen compounds filled his lungs, and he
felt momentarily dizzy with relaxation.