"Ken MacLeod - The Highway Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

III
FRANKENFOLK

We pulled into Lochcarron a couple of hours later. The journey hadn’t been
bad. The sun glared on the snow when we were up high on the hillsides, but
I had good shades. The black ice was murder down in the hollows, but the
truck had good tyres. Some new kind of carbon fibre stuff. Their grip was
magic. And we didn’t run into any bandits or wolves.

“When I was wee the snow would have melted long ago by now,” said
Euan. “Snow-line at fifty metres in March! It used to be nearer two
hundred.”

Lochcarron was a mile or two out of our way. We passed the end of
the road that led away to where we were going to work. That road cut
across the head of the sea-loch, towards the old railway line. A mile along it
you could see the bright yellow work cabins, and the big black reel that held
the cable that snaked out of the water. Lochcarron is a kilometre of houses
along the northern shore. This morning the loch was like glass. The long
ranges of hills that rose from both shores were mirrored in it like two wavy
blades. The hillsides were black with the ashes and stumps of trees that
had been nipped dead in the Big Freeze and burned in the forest fires of
the next summer. Tall windmills stood along the hills’ bare snow-covered
tops. If any of the blades were turning at all it was too slow to see. Some of
the windmill pylons were leaning over. Others lay flat on their sides. I
remember when wind-power farms were the next big thing. The wind had
other ideas.

I slowed the big truck as we came in, past the grassy patch that used
to be a golf course and the walled patch that’s still a cemetery. Around the
side of a hill to the village proper. The brown stones and grey pebble-dash
of the old houses were mixed in with the bright colours of the new ones.
Blue, pink, yellow, green. They looked more like machines than buildings.
Pipes and aerials sprouted from them. Thick insulating mats covered their
walls. Steep roofs jutted up like witches’ hats. The roofs of the old houses
were covered with solar-power tarps.

The hotel was one of the old buildings. Crumbling concrete patched
with insulating mats. Not much of a hotel now. More of a coffee shop and pit
stop. A couple of supply trucks and two or three small cars were filling up,
with red power cables and green bio-fuel lines plugged into their sides.
Behind the thick plastic of the front window the cafe was busy. I parked
around the side—our fuel cells were still well charged and the bio-fuel tank
was half full. The three of us trooped in. Warm air smelling of coffee steam
and frying bacon. About a dozen people sat around the tables. As usual
everybody stared at us. It’s these big yellow boiler-suits with highway on
front and back that does it. Dead giveaway. I was still throwing back my
hood and unzipping the front of my overall when I heard the first nasty
remark. One of the guys whose lorry was recharging outside—I could see