"James Van Pelt - Of Late I Dreamt of Venus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pelt James Van)

The trip from the carousel to Laputa took a little more than an
hour under constant acceleration or deceleration except for a stomach
lurching moment midway when the craft turned. Out the porthole
beside her seat, she could see Venus’ changed face. Where the sun hit, it
was much darker, but the sun itself was darker too, fuzzy and red, partly
blocked by the dust umbrella protecting the planet from the heat,
cooling it from its initial 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Henry offered a glass
of wine. She sipped it, enjoying its crisp edge. Wine swirled in the
bottom of the glass. She sipped again, held the taste in her mouth for a
few seconds before swallowing. “I don’t recognize this.”
He sat across from her. The wine bottle rested in a secure holder in
the table’s center. “It’s an eighty-year old Chateau Laputa. One of the



7
James Van Pelt


original bottles of Venusian aperitif. Bit of a gamble. Some of this
vintage didn’t age well, but it turns out being thirty percent closer to the
sun makes for excellent grapes. They grew them in soil from the surface,
heavily treated, of course.” The ferry shuddered. “Upper edges of the
atmosphere. We’ll be there soon.”
Through the porthole, Laputa appeared first as bright red glimmer
on Venus’ broad horizon, and as they grew closer, revealing details.
Elizabeth realized the glow was the sun’s reflected light. And then she
saw Laputa truly was huge, it felt like flying low over the San Gabriels
into the Los Angeles basin, when the city opened beneath her. But
Laputa dwarfed that. They continued to travel, bumping hard through
turbulence until the floating city’s boundaries disappeared to the left and
right, and then they were over the structure, their shadow racing across
the mirrored surface.
Inside she toured the engineering facilities where they built floating
atmosphere converters to work on the carbon dioxide gasses that trapped
so much heat. She met dozens of project managers and spoke briefly to a
room full of chief technicians. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t
act like the groups of upper management she was used to working with.
There was no jockeying for position, none of the push and pull of
internal politics that made corporate board rooms so interestingly tense.
None of the high stakes adrenaline she was so used to. They listened.
They took notes. They answered her questions, but they were quiet,
attentive. Worshipful, almost.
Henry drove her in a compact electric cart to the physics labs that
controlled the steady rain of Kuiper Belt objects bringing water to the
planet, even though it still boiled into vapor on the scalding surface. In a
large presentation room, dominated by a map of the solar system alive
with lights, each representing a ship or a station, the chief geologist
finished his speech. A long line of dots represented asteroids and Kuiper
Belt objects in transit tracing a curved path through the system ending at