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

"Thanks," I said, taking the coffee. "Nice dress."
Suze looked down at it smugly. "Fortuny pleats, they"re called," she said. "You can just ball it up in a rucksack, and when you shake it out it still looks great."
"Ah," I said, "I have something to show you."
I climbed back into my clothes, which were still sweaty and crumpled from travelling. They all added up to only part of the suit the rest being the mouse, and the rucksack with its contents but there was still enough for it to do the Cinderella trick, and mimic net and lace from an archived memory of debutante froth. I twirled, and grinned at Suze's open mouth.
"Smart-matter spacesuit," I explained, sitting down and patting its bouffant skirts. Suze was still goggle-eyed.
"You"re from space?"
"Yes," I said. "The Cassini Division, in fact."
"Wow!" Suze's amazed look turned to an awed, and slightly guilty, excitement which I'd encountered before. In a world of abundance, of peace and security, the Division was the biggest focus for the dangerous appeal of danger, the sexy thrill of violence. There were those who despised and feared it for that very reason, and those who sometimes secretly, even from themselves loved it. Suze, it seemed, was among the latter.
"That's why I want to talk to Malley," I said.
"About the wormhole?" Sharp girl.
"Yes. We want him to show us how to get through it. To New Mars."
"Start our own settlement?"
I shook my head firmly. "We-don't need another lot of deserts!" Something some sudden light in her eyes told me her secret answer: we do, we do! Not everybody would feel that way, but I knew that enough did for Wilde to have seen that look all the many times he told his tales. No wonder he had the crazy notion that if we could go through, we'd colonize the place.
"So why do we need to go through?" Suze asked. "Why now?"
"We need to go through," I said carefully, "because there's a chance that the people on the other side of the wormhole are tinkering about with the same entities that the Outwarders became the Jovians on this side. We"re going to go through, and stop them, with whatever it takes." (This was true, as far as it went, which was not very far.) Suze sat back in one of the armchairs and looked at me, shaking her head.
"Why don't people know about this? Why haven't we been told?"
"We"re not keeping it exactly secret," I said. "It's just that we"ve released the information in scientific reports and so on, rather than making a big splash of it. So far, everybody who's managed to figure out what's going on must have agreed with us that there's no need to panic."
"That may be right," she said indignantly, "but there is a need to discuss it! You can't just go and do something like that, without any, any -"
"Authorization? Actually, we can, in the sense that nobody could stop us. We wouldn't want to do that, because we that is, the Division would fall apart if we ever went against the Union, because we'd have a strong and well-armed minority who didn't want to go against the Union. But as a matter of fact, we do have authorization. We"re mandated to protect the Inner System from outside threats, and if a possible post-human invasion coming out of the wormhole isn't one, I don't know what is."
Suze still looked troubled. "What about the New Martians?" she asked. "I don't see them going along with it."
I laughed. "If they"re still people ... they"re just a bunch of noncos. And we know how to deal with them."
Suze shot me an odd glance, and seemed about to speak, but whatever was on her mind, she thought better of it.
"Well," she said brightly, "enough of this. Let's go and grab ourselves some aircraftmen." Dinner was in the great hall, with one of the daily planningmeetings before it (we sat it out in the bar) and a dance afterwards. The hall, a former exhibition centre, was decorated with murals depicting episodes from London's history: the Plague, the Fire, the Blitz, the Death; the battles of Cable Street, Lewisham, Trafalgar Square, . Norlonto; the horrors of life under the Greens (one particularly imaginative panel showed some persecuted rationalist tied to a tree and left to die of starvation and dehydration, gloating Green savages dancing around and a woman loyally lurking in nearby bushes, recording the words of the black gospel he croaked from his parched mouth); the joy and vengeance of liberation, cheering crowds welcoming the Sino-Soviet troops (the Sheenisov, as everybody still calls them) and stringing up Green chiefs and witchdoctors from their own sacred trees; the tense balloting of the social revolution. Uplifting stuff.
The other decoration in the hall, that of its occupants, was more attractive. Costume on Earth tends to follow local traditions and techniques; here, it was a native style, picked up (as we later noticed) from the non-cos: cotton, with lots of dyes and embroidery. Some of the clothes worn after work were far more beautiful than ours, but at least our party frocks marked us out as visitors. We had no lack of attention, and we did, indeed, pull an aircraftman each.
Early the next morning we made our separate ways back to the room in which neither of us had spent the night, gathered up ourgear, and had breakfast in the main hall. In the daylight the murals looked lurid and naive rather than heroic. The sunlight through the roof panels was bright and warm. Suze spread out a map.
"Well," she said, "where are we going today?"
"Our friend currently lives in Ealing Forest," I said. "I have a kind of address for him. He hangs out in some non-co technical college, and he's known to scour the markets for old books and gear."
"Easy," said Suze. "We drive down the main path to Camden Market, stash the car at the Union depot, then take a boat up the canal to the North Circular -" her finger jabbed at a trail marked on e map, then traced it to another thin line "then down into Ealing."
"You sure the canal's quickest?" Suze nodded briskly. "The roads are kept up by the non-cos, and they"re just what you'd expect. The waterways are ours. Everything from the dredging to the lock-keeping is done by Union machines."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "It's the least obtrusive way of keeping a presence. And if we ever need to increase it, the canals have the great advantage of going round the back, especially with hovercraft."
"Hmm," I said. "I wonder if we could get away with borrowing a hovercraft."
"Too noisy. The tourists don't like it, and it makes the locals expect trouble."
At the car-pool we selected a rugged, low-slung buggy with wheels that could, according to the spec, cope with any pothole or tree root in London. The controls were standard, but I didn't yet trust my reflexes in this gravity, so Suze took the wheel. We drove down the long, curving road to the southern exit, through a crowd of importunate people (for me, a new and alarming experience; for Suze: "Just beggars and pedlars; you"ll get used to it"), up and over a hill, and down into the wild woods.
The vehicle's compact electric engine was quiet. As we drove slowly along the muddy trackways, in the shade of tall oaks and elms dripping with the previous night's rain, we could hear constant birdsong, the occasional howl of a wolf or bark of a fox, and the faroff, uncanny whooping laugh of gibbons. Kestrels hovered high above the forest paths. Wood pigeons clattered among the trees, and now and again the vivid flash of a parakeet passed before our startled eyes. Every so often a small deer would bound on to the path, take one look at us and sprint away, its thudding hooves unexpectedly loud.
Most of the ruins on either side were covered with ivy, its green cables silently and slowly dragging the crumbled brickwork back into the earth. Some of the walls, however, bore the marks of recent repair, with clay and wattle or bricks cannibalized from other ruins making good the gaps, and the roofs usually a floor or two lower than the originals beamed and thatched. There were clearings where entire villages had been built from recycled materials, with not a trace of the original buildings left standing. We got used to treating rising smoke ahead as a signal to slow down and watch out for scuttling chickens, ambling pigs, barking dogs and racing, yelling children. The interest of the adults varied from covert and sullen to open and servile, the latter type frantically drawing our attention to wares that were depicted or described on garish signboards.
I put to Suze a question that had occurred to me from comparing old political maps with the current geographical ones: that the present communities might be remnants of the ancient, with Christian fundamentalists flourishing here, anarchic tribes around Alexandra Port, usurers still haunting the leaning towers down by the river, Muslims to the east and Hindus to the west ... but she disabused me of this fanciful notion. The vast migrations of the Death and the dark century had literally walked over the great city, leaving of its former fractious cultures not a trace.
The human traffic on the path increased as, over the next hour, we approached Camden Market. There were few powered vehicles, and horse-drawn ones were only a little more frequent. Pedestrians generally walked in groups: gay parties of tourists with rucksacks and rifles, who waved and greeted us as we passed; and serious squads of non-cos, tramping with heavy loads on their backs, or on overburdened animals, or on similarly overloaded carts. The noncos usually spared us no more than a calculating glance or a canny smile.
Camden Lock Market, a vast, trampled clearing at the intersection of several roads and a major canal, had the look of a place which the trees and their worshippers had never conquered. Like Alexandra Port, but for economic rather than strategic reasons, it had remained alive and functioning through all the disasters that had befallen the city. In physical extent it was actually larger than it had been in the twenty-first century, because some of London's other traditional markets, in the East, were now six feet under the Thames estuary at low tide.
Our first stop was the Union depot, a stockaded area on the edge of the market. Inside the casually guarded gate were a low garage, a Warehouse, and a rest-and-recreation building. Suze gave the last a disparaging glance.
"For wimps," she remarked. "What's the point of coming here if you"re not willing to mix?"
After we'd garaged the vehicle, hoisted our packs, holstered our 3I pistols and wandered around for a few minutes, I began to see exactly what the point was. The place was guaranteed to give most Union people a severe culture shock. To me it looked like utter chaos, and sounded to use words whose roots lie in ancient experiences of similar situations like a barbarous babel.
The market consisted of: long fenced-off areas packed with sadeyed beasts; marble tables running with the blood, piled with the flesh of beasts; fish swimming in glass tanks or flopping on slabs; canopied wooden tables stacked with pottery, weaponry, books, machinery, clothes, textiles, herbs, drugs, antiquities, foodstuffs; racks from which coats swayed and dresses fluttered in the warm breeze.
Each of the stalls and tables had behind it someone whose fulltime occupation was minding it, watching over it, talking to anybody on the other side of the table and passing wares over and taking money back. The sellers and the buyers filled the air with the sound of their dickering, bickering, joking, teasing, offering, refusing; and with the recorded music which every stall-holder, and most of their customers, discordantly inflicted on everybody else, played at an unsociable volume from portable devices which were aptly called loudspeakers.
Then there were the smells: of the animals and their dung and their slaughter, of the people and their sweat and the scents which failed to disguise it, of smoked herbal drugs which were, I began to suspect, not a recreation here but a necessity.
I stopped in front of a stall on which dried leaves of tobacco and hemp were laid out in labelled bundles, neatly sorted into opentopped boxes. The woman behind the stall was prettily dressed in an embroidered cotton blouse and a printed cotton long skirt, gathered at the waist with a drawstring. It was hard to work out her age like many of the adult non-cos, she seemed to combine the detached watchfulness of age with the innocent selfishness of youth, and, on top of that, her cosmetics made a baffling mask: her cheeks reddened, the rest of her face whitened, eyes darkened and lips flushed, as if she'd been awake all night and was now in a state of sexual arousal. But she had an attractive smile.
"Suze," I said, nudging, "could we ?"
Suze grinned and nodded, then, when I reached into the pocket of my rucksack, frowned and shook her head.
"I"ll do it," she murmured.
She looked up at the woman behind the table, and fingered a leaf labelled "Kent Ganja".