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

girl who had mistakenly followed her lover to a strange and alien land and who no longer knew
how he felt or thought.
They were flying in a French Air Bus. Baedecker noticed with a professional eye how the
wings flexed with greater latitude than a Boeing product and noted with some surprise the steep
angle of attack the Indian pilot chose. American airlines would not allow their pilots to horse the
machine around like that for fear of alarming their passengers. The Indian passengers did not
seem to notice. Their descent toward Bombay was so rapid that it reminded Baedecker of a ride
he had hopped into Pleiku in a C-130 where the pilot had been forced to drop in almost vertically
during the final approach for fear of small-arms fire.
Bombay seemed composed totally of shacks with tin roofs and factories rotting with age. Then
Baedecker caught a glimpse of high-rise buildings and the Arabian Sea, the plane banked at a
fifty-degree angle, a plateau rose to greet them out of the shacks, and they were down. Baedecker
nodded a silent compliment to the pilot.
The cab ride from the airport to his hotel was almost too much for Baedecker's exhausted
senses. Immediately beyond the gates of Bombay's Santa Cruz Airport the slums began. Dozens
of square miles of tin-roofed shacks, sagging canvas lean-tos, and narrow, muddy lanes stretched
on either side of the highway. At one point a twenty-foot-high water pipeline cut through the
tangle of hovels like a garden hose through an anthill. Brown-skinned children ran along the top
or reclined on its rusty sides. Everywhere there was the dizzying movement of uncountable
bodies.
It was very hot. The humid air pouring in the open windows of the taxi hit Baedecker like a
steam-heated exhaust. Occasionally he caught glimpses of the Arabian Sea to his right. A huge
billboard in the suburbs proclaimed 0 DAYS TO THE MOONSOON but there was no cooling
rain from the low ceiling of clouds, only a reflection of the terrible heat and an ominous sense of
weight that settled on his shoulders like a yoke.
The city itself was even more dizzying. Every side street became a tributary of white-shirted
humanity pouring into ever-larger streams and rivers of population gone insane. Thousands of
tiny storefronts offered their brightly colored wares to the millions of thronging pedestrians. The
cacophony of car horns, motors, and bicycle bells wrapped Baedecker in a thick blanket of
isolation. Gigantic, lurid billboards touted movies starring actors with pink cheeks and actresses
with raven hair, bee-stung lips, and a purplish cast to their complexions.
Then they were on Marine Drive, the Queen's Necklace, and the sea was a pounding, gray
presence to their right. To his left, Baedecker caught glimpses of cricket fields, open-air
crematoriums, temples, and high-rise office buildings. He thought that he could see a thin cloud
of vultures circling above the Tower of Silence, waiting for the bodies of the Parsee faithful, but
when he looked away, the specks continued to circle in the periphery of his vision.
The blast of air-conditioning inside the Oberoi Sheraton made his sodden skin tremble.
Baedecker hardly remembered registering or following the redcoated porter to his room on the
thirtieth floor. The carpets smelled of some sort of carbolic, antiseptic cleanser, a group of loud
Arabs in the elevator reeked of musk, and for a second Baedecker thought that he was going to
be sick. Then he was slipping a five-rupee note to the porter, the drapes were drawn across the
wide window, the door was closed, sounds were muffled, and Baedecker tossed his seersucker
coat on a chair and collapsed on the bed. He was asleep in ten seconds.
They had taken the Rover almost three miles, a record. It was a bumpy ride. The powdered
moondust flew out from each wheel in an odd, flat trajectory that fascinated Baedecker. The
world was bright and empty. Their shadow leaped ahead of them. Beyond the crackle of the
radio and the internal suit sounds, Baedecker sensed a silence cold and absolute.
The experiment site was well removed from the landing area in a flat spot near a small impact
crater designated Kate on their maps. They had been moving uphill gradually with the tiny
computer in the Rover memorizing each turn and twist. The landing module was a glitter of gold