"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

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 best of his growing ability and dwindling resources as a medicine
man, dealing out antibiotics and anti-geriatrics 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.
Malley 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