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

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 planning meetings 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 our gear, 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 far-off, 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.