"Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

supporting strength of his father's arms, the gentle rise and fall of the green waves, the perfect
synchronization of weight and buoyancy meeting in the ribbon of balance flowing up from the
balls of his feet.
He still dreamed about that.
The sun rose like a great, orange balloon, its sides shifting laterally as light refracted through
the warming air. Baedecker thought of Ektachrome photos in National Geographic. India!
Insects, birds, goats, chickens, and cattle added to the growing sound of traffic along the unseen
highway. Even this winding dirt road on which they walked was already crowded with people on
bicycles, bullock carts, heavy trucks labeled Public Transport, and an occasional black-and-
yellow taxi dodging in and out of the confusion like an angry bee.
Baedecker and the girl stopped by a small, green building that was either a farmhouse or a
Hindu temple. Perhaps it was both. Bells were ringing inside. The smell of incense and manure
drifted from an inner courtyard. Roosters were crowing and somewhere a man was chanting in a
frail-voiced falsetto. Another man — this one in a blue polyester business suit — stopped his
bicycle, stepped to the side of the road, and urinated into the temple yard.
A bullock cart lumbered past, axle grinding, yoke straining, and Baedecker turned to watch it.
A woman in the back of it lifted her sari to her face, but the three children next to her returned
Baedecker's stare. The man in front shouted at the laboring bullock and snapped a long stick
against a flank already scabrous with sores. Suddenly all other noises were lost as an Air India
747 roared overhead, its metal sides catching the gold of the rising sun.
'What's that smell?' asked Baedecker. Above the general onslaught of odors — wet soil, open
sewage, car exhausts, compost heaps, pollution from the unseen city — there rose a sweet,
overpowering scent that already seemed to have permeated his skin and clothes.
'They're cooking breakfast,' said Maggie Brown. 'All over the country, they're cooking
breakfast over open fires. Most of them using dried cow dung as fuel. Eight hundred million
people cooking breakfast. Gandhi once wrote that that was the eternal scent of India.' Baedecker
nodded. The sunrise was being swallowed by lowering monsoon clouds. For a second the trees
and grass were a brilliant, false green, made even more pronounced by Baedecker's fatigue. The
headache, which had been with him since Frankfurt, had moved from behind his eyes to a point
at the base of his neck. Every step sent an echo of pain through his head. Yet the pain seemed a
distant and unimportant thing, perceived as it was through a haze of exhaustion and jet lag. It
was part of the strangeness — the new smells, the odd cacophony of rural and urban sounds, this
attractive young woman at his side with sunlight outlining her cheekbones and setting fire to her
green eyes. What was she to his son anyway? How serious was their relationship? Baedecker
wished he had asked Joan more questions about the girl, but the visit had been uncomfortable
and he had been in a hurry to leave.
Baedecker looked at Maggie Brown and realized that he was being sexist in thinking of her as
a girl. The young woman seemed to possess that sense of self-possession, of awareness, which
Baedecker associated with true adults as opposed to those who had simply grown up. Looking
again, Baedecker guessed that Maggie Brown was at least in her mid-twenties, several years
older than Scott. Hadn't Joan said something about their son's friend being a graduate student and
teaching assistant?
'Did you come to India just to visit Scott?' asked Maggie Brown. They were on the circular
drive again, approaching the airport.
'Yes. No,' said Baedecker. 'That is, I came to see Scott, but I arranged a business trip to
coincide with it.'
'Don't you work for the government?' asked Maggie. 'The space people?' Baedecker smiled at
the image 'the space people' evoked. 'Not for the past twelve years,' he said and told her about the
aerospace firm in St. Louis for which he worked.
'So you don't have anything to do with the space shuttle?' said Maggie. 'Not really. We had