"Paul J. McAuley - Rocket Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

He woke when the spacer stirred. It was three or four in the morning, and still
dark. The traffic on the beltway was as sparse as it ever got. Rocket Boy took the
spacer, who told him that his name was Arpad, to the solitary standpipe that
supplied water to everyone who lived under the intersection, and then walked with
him along Industry Way toward the bus stop at a crossroads. Arpad told him that he
was from Earth, like most of the human race; said that by the universes clock he was
seven hundred and fifty years old, give or take a decade, but most of that was down
to time compression; said that he’d visited most human worlds, and this one was the
most miserable he’d ever seen.

“Of course, you just had yourselves a revolution, but still.”

“It was a war, not a revolution. Our enemy took our country from us.” Rocket
Boy hesitated, then said in a rush, “One day I want to go up and out. There is
nothing for me here.”

“If you go up and out, you’ll lose everything you ever knew or loved. People,
your home, your country . . . You can’t ever go home again; time compression will
see to that.”

“I’ve already lost all that. If I went up and out, I wouldn’t ever want to come
back.”

Arpad studied Rocket Boy sidelong. “I guess the war here didn’t do you any
favors, huh?”

Rocket Boy shrugged, feeling a twinge of the old bitter hurt he could never
bury deeply enough. He’d never talked about it with anyone; not even the old man.

“What was it about, this war of yours?”

“The enemy wanted our fertile land. There isn’t enough, just strips here and
there around the edge of the land. The enemy had a bad drought, and they took our
country because they wanted to steal our good river land.”
 “What I don’t understand is, when you got a continent here size of Asia and
the Americas combined, and everyone lives at the edge of the sea, how come you
people don’t try to settle inland? Man I work for came here to hunt the big critters
that live there, but there’s no kind of critter so fierce people can’t deal with them.”

“It isn’t the monsters,” Rocket Boy said. “It’s the wild itself.””

He told the spacer about the deserts beyond the mountains where no rain fell
for years on end, about the endless dust storms and tornados and lightning storms.
About how, in the center of the wild, it was so hot in the day that water boiled, and
so cold at night it froze. He told him the story everyone learned in school, about the
man who in the early days of the settling of the world had claimed he was the son of
God, and had led a hundred followers across the mountains to a valley where water
could be raised from deep aquifers. But insects had eaten most of their crops, dust
storms had destroyed the rest, and when survivors had been discovered two years
later, they had resorted to cannibalism.