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

I dragged up the unfamiliar word from old memories.
"Someone who studies society?" She nodded. "Yes, but there's not much to study any more!P "How d"you mean?"
"Look around you." She waved a hand. "These days, you want to investigate society, and what do you find?"
It was a rhetorical question, but I really wanted to know her answer.
"Well," she went on, "it's all so obvious, so transparent. We all know how things work from the age of about five or so. You go and try to find out, and somebody will just tell you! And it"ll be true, there are no secrets, nothing going on behind the scenes. Because there are no scenes, know what I mean?"
"Yes, of course," I said, thinking Ha! Little do you know, girl! "So what society do you study, if not our own?"
"I study the old system," Suze said, "and I do learn interesting things. Sometimes I just can't help telling people about them. And anyway, it's a way of getting people to talk."
I snorted. "Yeah, it's a great line," I said. "Almost anything you"re doing, you can say to someone, "Did you know that under the wages system, some people had to do this every day or starve to death?" "
She laughed at my mock-shocked tone and saucer eyes. For the next few minutes we vied to suggest some activity to which the statement didn't apply, and found our resources of ribaldry and gruesomeness inadequate to the task.
"All the same," she said when we'd given up, "it is fascinating in a way." She shot me a glance, as if unsure whether to go on. "Capitalism had a sort of ... elegance about it. The trouble is, well, the old people, uh, no offence, aren't very good at explaining it, because they hate it so much, and the old books . . ." She sighed and shrugged. "They just don't make sense. They have all these equations in them, like real science, but you look at the assumptions and you think, hey, wait a minute, that can't be right, so how did it work? Anyway," she went on, more firmly, "it's the only interesting sociological question left." She looked out of the window, then leaned forward and spoke quietly. "That's why I go to London," she confided. "To talk to people outside the Union."
Then she leaned back, and looked at me as if defying me to be shocked, unsure that she hadn't misjudged my broad-mindedness. I didn't need to feign my response I was pleased, and interested.
We had, of course, a network of agents and contacts in the London area, and the old comrades could always be counted on but my mission was too secret even for them. Nobody knew I was coming, or what I was looking for, although that information-leakage couldn't be delayed much longer. I had expected to have to rely on hastily learned, and possibily outdated, background.
Now I had the possibility of a guide. This could be a stroke. of luck! Or something else entirely, if I wanted to be paranoid about it. Her earlier comments about there being no secrets were too transparent to be some kind of double bluff; if she were involved in any secrets herself (other than her to some distasteful interests) she would hardly have brought the subject up. And anyway, she was too young ...
I studied her face, and tried to hide my second thoughts, my second-guessing of myself. You lose the knack for conspiracy, over the decades and centuries. The Division was not the Union, true enough, but even our politics had weathered and softened into nonlethality, like a rusty artillery piece in a mossy emplacement all our destructive power was directed outwards.
I decided that, whether her presence was fortuitous, or the outcome of one of those hidden forces whose existence she'd so naively denied, I couldn't lose. If she was innocent, then I'd gain some valuable contacts and information if not, the only way to find out was by playing along.
So I said: "Hmm, that's interesting. Do you know many noncooperators?" (That was the polite term; the others included "parasites", "scabs", "scum", and spoken with a sneer and a pretend spit "bankers".) It was considered all right to exchange coins with them for their odd handicrafts and eccentric nanofactures, and to employ them as guides but most people shrank from any closer contact, as if the non-cos carried some invisible skin disease.
"A few," she said, looking relieved. "I"m studying, you know, trade Patterns in the Thames Valley."
"Trade patterns?"
"Most people think the non-cos live by scrounging stuff from the Union, but that's just a prejudice." She grimaced; she was still talking in a low voice, as if not wanting the other passengers to overhear. "Actually they"re pretty self-sufficient. They make things and swap them among themselves, using little metal weights for indirect swaps. That's why whenever they offer to do things for tourists, they only do it for metal weights." Suze laughed. "There I go again. I"m sure you know all this."
"Well, in theory," I admitted, "but it"ll be interesting to see how it works in practice. The fact is, I"m going to London to find a certain person." I thought about risks. I'd be making inquiries after this guy as soon as we landed, among all kinds of people. No matter how discreet I was about it, word would get around. There seemed to be no harm in starting now. "His name is Isambard Kingdom Malley."
"He's alive?" Suze sounded incredulous. "In London?" Comprehension dawned on her face.
"Yes," I said. "He's a non-co."
Isambard Kingdom Malley was, or had been, a physicist. He worked out the Theory of Everything. The final equations. When I was as young as I look, there was a fashion for tee shirts with the Malley equations on them. TOE shirts, we called them. The equations, at least, were elegant.
Malley was born in 2039, so he was six years old at the time of the Fall Revolution. His theory was born in the early 2o6os, in the brief surge of new technologies and research advances that marked the period when the US/UN empire had fallen, but.the barbarians had not yet won. His last paper was the modest classic Space-time manipulation with non-exotic matter, Malley, I K, Phys. Rev. D 128 (10), 3182 (2080). It established the theoretical possibility of the quantum-chaotic wormhole and the vacuum-fluctuation virtualmass drive. Its celebrated "Appendix II: Engineering Considerations" pointed out some practical problems with constructing the Gate and the Drive, notably that it would require about a billion times as much computational power as was currently available.
A week after the article's publication, the journal was shut down by the gang in charge of its local fragment of the Former United States, for "un-Scriptural physical speculation", "blasphemy", and (according to some sources) "witchcraft". There's a certain elegiac aptness in the thought that the paper which pointed the road to the stars was published in what turned out to be the journal's final issue: the West was still soaring when it fell.
Thirteen years later, the Outwarders built the wormhole gate and torched off their interstellar probe, reaching for the end of space and time. That it never did reach the expected end that it was, in fact, still going strong, still transmitting almost incomprehensible data from an unimaginable futurity refuted Malley's Theory of Everything, which had been based on the hitherto impregnable Standard Model finite-universe cosmology. But Malley's was still the only theory we had. It fitted all the data, except the irrefragable fact of the probe. Within the limits of our engineering, the theory still worked. Nobody had come up with anything to replace it. (This was a sore point with me. I sometimes thought it reflected badly on our society: perhaps, after all, it does take some fundamental social insecurity to sharpen the wits of genius. Perhaps we had no more chance of developing further fundamental physics than the Pacific Islanders had of developing the steam engine. Or I hoped it could just be that a Newton, an Einstein or a Malley doesn't come along very often.) I suspected that Malley would have been an Outwarder himself, but he never made it to space. America's last launch sites were already being stormed by mobs who thought rockets damaged the ozone layer, or made holes in the crystal spheres of the firmament.
He fled America for Japan, and then quixotically returned to England at the time of the Green Death, where he worked to the Tbest of his growing ability and dwindling resources as a medicine man, dealing out antibiotics and antigeriatrics to superstitious settlers and nostalgic refugees, administering the telomere hack to frightened adolescents who understood it, if at all, as yet another rite-of-passage ordeal. We knew he'd survived the century of barbarism, and that he'd registered to vote in the elections that formally abolished capitalism and established the Solar Union. Evidently he'd voted against the social revolution, because in the subsequent century of the world commonwealth he had retreated to he wilds of London, a stubborn non-cooperator.
We badly needed his cooperation now.
alley was apparently following the Epicurean injunction to "live unknown". Suze had never heard so much as a rumour of him.
"Would you like me to come with you, at least part of the way?" she suggested. "I could help you find your way around, and you could well, to be honest there are places I'd rather not go on my own.
"Yes, I'd like that very much," I said. "That's real neighbourly of you, Suze."
She gave me a full-beam smile and asked, "How do you expect to track him down? Do you have any idea where he is? And why do you want to talk to him, anyway? If you don't mind me asking."
I scratched my ear and looked out of the window. We were again above some low cloud, and through its dazzling white a town rose on our left. "Swindon tower," Suze remarked. Ahead of us the airship's shadow raced like a rippling fluke across the contours of the clouds. I looked back at Suze.
"No, I don't mind you asking," I said. "I"ll tell you the answers once we have a bit more privacy. And then, it"ll be up to you whether you want to come along with me or not."
"That's OK," she said.
"Tell me what you"ve found out about London," I said, and she did. By the time she had finished, we were almost there. We looked out at woodlands and marshes, ruins and the traces of streets and arterial roads, at the junctions of which smoke drifted up from the chimneys of huddled settlements. Suze began excitedly pointing out landmarks: Heathrow airport, its hexagram of runways only visible from the air, like the sigil of some ancient cult addressed to gods in the sky; the Thames Flood Barrier far to the east, a lonely line of silver dots in the Thames flood plain; Hyde Park with its historic Speaker's Corner, where the Memorial to the Unknown Socialist rose a hundred metres above the trees, gazing in the disdain of victory at the fallen or falling towers of the City; and, as the airship turned and began to drift lower, our destination, the proud pylons of Alexandra Port.
The sight of Alexandra Port set the hairs of my nape prickling. It had been one of the early centres of the space movement which was the common ancestor of the Outwarders and ourselves; there were people alive today whose journey into space had begun in its crowded concourses, waiting for the airship connection to the launch sites of Guine and Khazakhstan. Its mooring masts were their Statue of Liberty, their Ellis Island.
Or their Botany Bay. My fingernails were digging into my palms. I turned away and prepared to disembark.
The airship settled, its motors humming as they steadied its position, just above the terminal's flat roof. A wheeled stairway rolled up to the exit and we all trooped down. Two or three people working on maintenance boarded the dirigible and began checking it over; although its automated systems were more than adequate to the task, there's something about aviation which keeps the habit of human supervision alive.
From the terminal's roof we could see an almost panoramic view of London, its rolling hills hazy with woodsmoke. The trees were interrupted here and there by towers whose steel and concrete had survived two centuries of neglect, and by broad corridors around ancient roadways. To the east the Lee Water broadened out to the Hackney marshes and the distant gleam of the Thames. On the nearby hills to the west the ruins of the old brick buildings and streets were still, barely, visible as crumbling walls and cracked slabs among the trees.
It was a common misconception one which, to be honest, none of us had ever found it politic to publicly correct, though the facts were there for anyone who cared to look that the Green Death was a single plague, the result of a virus genetically engineered by some Green faction in a fit of Malthusian overkill. More sober epidemiology has revealed that it was several diseases, probably natural, all of which hit at the same time and which were spread by soldiers, refugees and settlers. The disorder, and the weakening of the social immune-systems of medicine and science, were indeed partly the responsibility of the Green gangs and their many allies and precursors, going back through a century or more of irrationalism and anti-humanism. Indeed, the panicky abandonment of the cities as plague-centres was itself, in part, the outcome of that way of thinking, and it probably led to more deaths than the diseases ever did. So, while the Greens weren't quite as responsible as folk once thought for the billions of deaths, I find it hard to reproach anyone for the so-called "excesses" after the liberation. (The execution figures were inflated by over-enthusiastic local committees, anyway. It wasn't more than a hundred thousand, worldwide. Tops. Honestly.) The long-term effect of the Green Death wasn't on the size of the population which bounced back sharply after the social revolution, and was now coming along very nicely, thank you but on its distribution. Most of the old metropoles remained empty, long after they became perfectly safe to live in. They were happily left, quite appropriately, to those who rejected the new society and preferred some version of the old.
The countryside, too, was reverting to the wild, as agriculture was replaced by aquaculture, hydroponics, and artificial photosynthesis. It was less frequently ceded to the non-cos than the old cities, however, because of its recreational value to people from the dense arcologies of the Union.
Alexandra Port itself had changed little, because it had never been abandoned to the ravages of nature or man. In the Green Death it had been a conduit for refugees going out and relief flowing in, and even in the West's century of collapse it had been maintained by the earthbound remnant of the Space Movement, its boundaries guarded, its personnel supplied from outside, a garrison in the midst of desolation.
It was all just like in the old pictures, I thought as we descended to the concourse: the People's Palace, retro-styled even when it was new, back in the twentieth century, and the newer, twenty-firstcentury terminal buildings and workshops sprawling across the crown of the hill under the high pylons. The only evidence of modern technology I could see was the escalator down which we rode and its continuation in the walkway which carried us to the exit. Their seamless flow of plastic not nanotech, just clever would have baffled the complex's early engineers.
We walked over to the People's Palace, now a guesthouse as well as a home for the people working in the port. I looked at the sun, and at my watch.
"Shall we stay here for the night?" I suggested. "Go on our travels in the morning?"
Suze nodded. "Yeah, it's too late to go travelling," she said. "I do know some places to sleep in London, but they"re strictly something you do for the experience." We checked at the board in the foyer and found there were plenty of vacancies; most of our fellow tourists apparently preferred the dubious glamour and adventure of finding accommodation in one of London's native inns or shooting lodges. We selected a double room in the west wing, and took our stuff up. There was a small stove, coffee, and other supplies in the room, and an invitation to the evening meal and/or later social activities. While Suze was showering, I asked the suit to make an unobtrusive sweep of the room. It found nothing, apart from the expected wildlife and the standard cleany-crawlies. There were definitely none of the other kind of bugs not that I seriously expected any, but it was routine, like the airship inspection.
Suze stepped out of the shower just as the suit's agent was reporting back.
"Oh!" she said. "A pet mouse. How sweet!"
"Grrr," said the suit, but I"m sure all Suze heard was a squeak. I took a shower myself, and emerged to find that Suze had brewed some coffee and dressed for dinner.