"Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

was confined, as thousands of human voices and sounds -- meaningless to me, meaningful to
them -- were swallowed by each successive tunnel of this journey whose destination I did not
know. In the distance the surrounding space kept being pierced by streaks of vehicles unknown to
me -- aircraft, probably, because now and then they veered up or down, spiraling into space, so
that I automatically expected a terrible crash, since I saw neither guide wires nor rails, if these
were elevated trains. When the blurred hurricanes of motion were interrupted for a moment, from
behind them emerged majestically slow, huge surfaces filled with people, like flying stations,
which went in various directions, passed one another, lifted, and seemed to merge by tricks of
perspective. It was hard to rest the eye on anything that was not in motion, because the
architecture on all sides appeared to consist in motion alone, in change, and even what I had
initially taken to be a vaulted ceiling were only overhanging tiers, tiers that now gave way to
other, higher tiers and levels. Suddenly a heavy purple glare, as though an atomic fire had flared
up somewhere far away in the heart of the building, filtered its way through the glass of the
ceilings, of those mysterious columns, and was reflected by the silver surfaces; it bled into every
corner, into the interiors of the passageways that glided by, into the features of the people. The
green of the incessantly jumping neons became dingy; the milkiness of the parabolic buttresses
grew pink. In this sudden saturation of the air with redness lay a foreboding of catastrophe, or so
it seemed to me, but no one paid the least attention to the change, and I could not even say when
it cleared away.
At the sides of our ramp appeared whirling green circles, like neon rings suspended in
midair, whereupon some of the people stepped down onto the approaching branch of another
ramp or walkway; I observed that one could pass through the green lines of those lights quite
freely, as if they were not material.
For a while I let myself be carried along by the white walkway, until it occurred to me
that perhaps I was already outside the station and that this fantastic panorama of sloping glass,
which looked constantly as if on the verge of flight, was in fact the city, and that the one I had left
behind existed now only in my memory.
"Excuse me." I touched the arm of the man in fur. "Where are we?"
They both looked at me. Their faces, when they raised them, took on a startled expression.
I had the faint hope that it was only because of my height
"On the polyduct," said the man. "Which is your switch?"
I did not understand.
"Are. . . are we still in the station?"
"Obviously," he replied with a certain caution.
"But. . . where is the Inner Circle?"
"You've already missed it. You'll have to backtrack."
"The rast from Merid would be better," said the woman. All the eyes of her dress seemed
to stare at me with suspicion and amazement.
"Rast?" I repeated helplessly.
"Right over there." She pointed to an unoccupied elevation with black-and-silver-striped
sides; it resembled the hull of a peculiarly painted vessel lying on its side. This, visible through
an approaching green circle. I thanked them and stepped off the walkway, probably at the wrong
spot, because the momentum made me stumble. I caught my balance but was spun around, so that
I did not know in which direction to go. I considered what to do, but by this time my transfer
point had moved considerably from the black-and-silver hill that the woman had shown me, and I
could not find it now. Since most of the people around me were stepping onto an upward ramp, I
did the same. On it, I noticed a giant stationary sign burning in the air: DUCT CENT. The rest of
the letters, on either side, were not visible because of their magnitude. Noiselessly I was carried
to a platform at least a kilometer long from which a spindle-shaped craft was just departing,
showing, as it rose, a bottom riddled with lights. But perhaps that leviathan shape was the