"Fall Revolution - 03 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

We stood looking at each other for a moment.
"The things you see when you don't have your camera," I said.
"I didn't follow you," he said awkwardly. "I was just looking around. Last part of my job for the evening. It's amazing the crazy things people do up here, after a party."
"Can you forget this?" I asked.
"OK," he said. He looked away.
"Then I"ll promise to forget you." I reached out and caught his hand. "Come on. I"ve had a lot of drinks, and you"ve had none, right?"
"Yes," he said, looking a bit puzzled as I tugged at his hand and set off determinedly towards the elevator shaft. I grinned down at him.
"What better way to start the night?"
"You have a point there," he said.
"Well, no," I said, "I rather hope you ..."
Laughing, we went to his room.
When you are among another people, or another people is among you, and you lust after their strange flesh, go you and take your pleasure in them, and have sons and daughters by them, and your people shall live long upon the lands and your children shall fill the skies.
So it is written in the Books of Jordan, anyway. Genetics, chapter 3, verse 8.
I woke in a comfortable, if disorderly, bed. Stephan Vrij snored peacefully beside me. We were both naked, and I was under a quilt. I drew the quilt over him and he rolled over in his sleep.
From the angle of the light through the window, it was midmorning on another fine day. The room was made of something that looked and smelled like pine, but it had never been cut into planks then hammered or glued together (which some people on Earth still do, as I later discovered, and not all of them because they have to but because they can afford the time to indulge such fads). Instead, it had been grown on-site, the walls and floor curving into each other, utility cables emerging like vines from the knotholes. Glossy monochrome pictures of people, landscapes, seascapes were stuck to the walls. They looked detailed and precise, just like photographs, apart from the lack of colour. Scattered about, on the low chairs and table or on the floor, was a rather embarrassing quantity and diversity of lingerie. Evidently I had been showing off, or the smart-suit had. My memories of the night were hazy, and warm.
I lay there a few minutes, smiling to myself and hoping I'd got pregnant. Doing so just before a war seemed perverse it's traditionally done afterwards but this war would be over before the pregnancy was noticeable. If we won, I might not be back on Earth for a long time, and we needed all the genes we could get. If we lost ... but defeat wasn't worth thinking about.
I rolled out of bed and gathered the bits and pieces and set them to work reassembling themselves into hiking gear, apart from the one or two items that would be serviceable as underwear. Not that I actually needed underwear in a smart-matter spacesuit, but they Were very nice. So, in their own way, were the shorts and socks, boots and rucksack that came together on the floor. The suit always slid have good taste.
The apartment was pretty basic and standard, and the functional logic of it was familiar, so I had no difficulty in finding the makings of breakfast. I brought the breakfast through to Stephan, and we ate it, and made love for a final time. Stephan took some photographs of me, and I promised again to forget him, and we said goodbye.
I suppose he has forgotten me, by now, but I like to think that someone still has the photographs.
Down at ground level it was hot. The sun was high in the sky, enormous, so bright I could see it with my eyes closed and so hot it hurt my skin. Even the air was hot. It's one of the things they don't tell you about, like gravity.
Between the base of the tower and the beach were some low buildings. Stores and warehouses of equipment for use by people working in the blue-greens or playing on the beach, refreshment stalls, eating-houses, and so on. I wandered along the shore road, looking for the tourist place.
Naked small children ran about, yelling, racing from the tower to the beach and back. Somewhat older children lolled in shade and listened to adults or adolescents as they talked earnestly in front of a flip-chart or above a machine. Now and again a child would join one of these groups; now and again a child would rise, nod politely to the teacher, and wander off to do something else.
Two such children were minding the tourist place when I found it. The store was easy enough to spot, a rough construction of seacrete and plastic and what looked like driftwood, but was probably scrap synthetic wood. I told myself it must be more solid than it looked, as I ducked under the sea-silk awning and stood blinking in the cool, dim interior.
Inside, the walls were lined with sagging shelves, which were piled with everything a tourist might need. Old tin boxes of gold and silver coins, new plastic boxes of bullets, firearms oiled and racked, hats, scarves, boots. From the ceiling hung a wide range of casual clothing: loose sundresses, seal-fur suits, tee shirts and towelling robes. There seemed to be more possible destinations than the number of possible tourists. I was alone in the store, apart from a boy and a girl sitting on the counter with a chessboard between them.
The boy looked up. "Hi," he said. He waved his hand. "Help yourself. If you want something that isn't there, let us know." He smiled absently then returned to frowning over the chessboard. I dug through clinking piles of dollars, roubles, marks, pounds, and yen to make up sixty grams of gold and a hundred of silver, in the smallest coins I could find. From the weapons rack I selected a .45 automatic and a dozen clips of ammunition. Food and other consumables I could get anywhere, and the suit had produced better boots, socks, etc. than anything here. But I couldn't pass up the chance of an amazing penknife with a red handle marked with an inlaid steel cross within a shield. It had two blades and a lot of ingenious tools. I was sure I'd find a use for most of them.
I said goodbye to the children, promised to pass on anything I didn't use (with a mental reservation about the knife), and stepped out again into the sunlight. After a few seconds I went back inside and picked up a pair of sunglasses. The girl's laughter followed me out.
Now that I didn't have to screw up my eyes to look up, it was easy to work out the location of the airport from the paths of the airships and microlights and helicopters. I followed the coast road for a couple of miles until I reached it. I got several offers of lifts on the way, but I declined them all. Despite the heat, and the gravity, and the moments of disorientation when some conservative part of my brain decided the horizon just could not be that far away, I had to get used to walking in the open on the surface of this planet; and soon, to my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it. The sea breeze carried the homely scent of blue-green fields, the distant converters shimmered and hummed, the nearby waters within the artificial reef sparkled, and on them swimmers and boating-parties filled the air with joyous cries.
The airport was on a spit of land that extended a few hundred yards, traversing the reef-barrier. Airships wallowed at mooring masts, "copters and microlights buzzed between them. High overhead, the diamond-fibre flying-wings used for serious lifting strained at their cables like gigantic kites. I had arrived on one, from the Guine spaceport, and it looked as if I'd have to leave on one. The thought of an airship passage was appealing, but it would take too long. I didn't know how much time I had to spare, but the final deadline, the Impact Event, was less than three weeks away. Whatever I did had to be done before that.
Just before the airport perimeter fence I turned and looked back at the Casa Azores. From here it was possible to see it, if not take it all in. A hundred and fifty metres square at the base, tapering in its kilometre height to a hundred at the top. The sides looked oddly natural, covered by climbing plants and hanging gardens, pocked by glider-ports, and by window-bays which shone like ice. Built and maintained by quadrillions of organically engineered nanomachines, it was almost as remarkable as a tree, and a good deal more efficient. The way of life that it and the surrounding aquaculture sustained was not mine, but it was one I was happy to protect. Plenty of interesting work, and plenty of interesting leisure; adventure if you wanted it, ease if you preferred that. Indefinitely extended youth and health. Anything that you couldn't get for the asking you could, with some feasible commitment of time and trouble, nanofacture for yourself.
The paucity of broadcast media, and the difficulties of real-time communication, were the only losses from the world before the Fall and the Crash. We had tried to make it an opportunity. All the entertainment and knowledge to be found among thirty billion people was (eventually) available on pipe, and live action provided by the steady, casual arrival and departure of entertainers and researchers and lecturers. The absence of artificial celebrity meant the endless presence of surprise.
Throughout the Inner System Earth, near-Earth, Lagrange, Luna, Mars, and the Belt variants of this same way of life went on. Cultures and languages were more diverse than ever, but the system that underpinned them was the same everywhere. In floating cities, in artificial mountains stepped like ziggurats, in towers like this or taller, in towns below the ground, in huge orbital habitats, in sunlit pressure domes, in caves of ice, most people had settled into this lifestyle: simple, self-sufficient, low-impact, and ecologically sound.
It was sustainable materially and psychologically, a climax community of the human species, the natural environment of a conscious animal, which that conscious animal, after so much time and trouble, had at last made for itself. We called it the Heliocene Epoch. It seemed like a moment in the sun, but there was no reason, in principle, why it couldn't outlast the sun, and spread to all the suns of the sky.
With our solar mirrors we controlled the polar caps. The glaciations and mass extinctions that had marked the Pleistocene were over; the next ice age, long overdue, would never come. With our space-based lasers and nukes, we could shield the earth from asteroid impacts. We could bring back lost species from the DNA in museum exhibits. Soon, any century now, we would control the Milankovitch cycle. We were secure.
No wonder they had so few tourists here: who would want to leave a place like this? I sighed, with a small shiver, and turned to the airport gate. w 2 After London I GOT MY airship journey, after all. The flying-wing route took me as far as Bristol, a city that was still a port for Atlantic traffic, though no longer for trade. The old city with its docks had been fairly well preserved, but the quays where sugar (exchanged for, and grown by, slaves) had once been landed now sustained only recreational craft. The new town was in the fashionable Aztecpyramid style, with a projecting air-jetty about halfway up. We landed there at one p.m., having left Graciosa at eleven. I was lucky to catch the day's second flight to London. It left at around onethirty in the afternoon, and would reach Alexandra Port about six. This is the sort of thing that happens when you travel inside an atmosphere.
Weather, of course, is another. I stepped out of the, lift and on to the roof, to find large drops of water falling from the grey sky, on to me. I dug out of my rucksack a hooded cape all part of the suit, naturally and put it on. With the hood to keep water out of my eyes, it was easier to see where I was. The roof had the size and appearance of a small park apart from the hills in the distance and the curious visual effects the rain made, it could have been under a municipal dome anywhere. I walked across the grass, past dripping trees and bushes, to where a small and gaily coloured dirigible was moored to a central pylon. Other people were also making their way over, a couple of dozen in all when we'd climbed the spiral staircase and crossed the gangway to the airship's gondola. My fellow passengers were dressed similarly to me, but most carried rather more equipment. From overheard conversations as we shook out our wet overclothes and took our seats, I gathered that most of them were at least to themselves serious eco-tourists, earnestly studying natural history or urban archaeology. But few had resisted the temptation to bring a rod or a rifle. The hunting and fishing in London was reputed to be excellent.
The seating was arranged in a manner more like a room than a vehicle, but I had no difficulty getting a ,seat by a window. The airship cast off on schedule, rising through the low cloud and then passing beyond it. After staring out the window for half-an-hour at deciduous woodland interrupted only by old roads and new buildings, I got up and wandered around asking people what refreshments they wanted, then went to the galley and prepared them.
While the coffee was brewing I was joined by a woman who introduced herself as Suze. She was small, brown-haired, hazeleyed, dark-skinned. Very English. I figured her for being about her apparent age.
"Did you know," she said as we poured coffee into mugs and tea into cups, "that in the old system, there were people who did this as a full-time occupation?"
"Did what?"
"Serve refreshments on aircraft." I knew this perfectly well.
"Really?" I said. "Why? Did they ... enjoy it or something?"
"No," she said earnestly, "they did it because it was a way of getting what they needed to live on."
I waved a hand at the rack of sandwiches. "You mean this was all they had to eat?"
"No, no, it was because -"
She laughed suddenly. "You"re winding me up, aren't you?"
"Yes," I admitted. I started pouring the coffee. "Let's see if we can do the job better than the wage slaves, shall we?"
When we'd finished serving lunch to the other passengers we ook our own trays. I saw that she, like myself, was making to sit alone, so I asked her to join me. We talked as we ate.
It wasn't polite to ask neighbours what they were doing, where they were going, and so on. You had to work around to it, and not pry if they didn't open up.
"Why did you tell me that thing about the old system?" I asked.
"At the moment," Suze said, "I"m a sociologist."