"Fall Revolution - 04 - The Sky Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)
The table's centre-piece was all black within, except for an arrangement of points of light which might have been torches, or cities, or stars. They flashed on and off, on and off, and the bright dots spelled out one word: HELP.
I glanced over at Menial. 'It's reached the end of its run,' I remarked.
'Reset it then,' she said sleepily from the pillow.
I brushed the stone's chill surface with my sleeve, restoring it to chaos, and with a final smile at Mer-
THE SKY ROAD 23
rial opened the door and stepped out into the cock-crowing sunlight.
and she threw her arms around him that same night she drew him down.
2
ANCIENT TIME
D.
eath follows me, she thought, as she rode into the labour-camp. There was something implacable about it, like logic: it follows, it follows . . . The thought's occurrence had nothing to do with logic; it appeared like a screensaver on the surface of her mind, whenever her mind went blank. It troubled her a little, as did another thought that drifted by in such moments: where are the swift cavalry ?
The gate rolled shut behind her, squealing in its rusty grooves. The wind from the steppe hummed in the barbed-wire fence and whipped away the dust kicked up as she reined in the black horse. A guard hurried over; he somehow managed to make his brisk soldierly step look obsequious, even as his bearing made his dark-blue microfibre fatigues look military. He doffed a baseball cap with the Mutual Protection lettering and logo.
' Good morning, Citizen.'
That title was already an honorific. Myra Godwin-Davidova smiled and handed him the reins.
'Good morning,' she said, swinging down from
THE SKY ROAD 25
the horse. She could hear her knee-joints creak. She lifted the saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The weight almost made her stagger, and the guard's arm twitched towards her; but she wasn't going to accept any help from that quarter. 'That will be all, thank you.'
'As you wish, Citizen.' The guard saluted and replaced his cap. She was still looking down at him, her riding-boots adding three inches to her five-foot-eleven height.
She patted the big mare's rump and watched as the guard led the beast away, then set off towards the accommodation huts. As she walked she pulled off her leather gauntlets and stuffed them awkwardly into the deep pockets of her long fur coat, and tucked a stray strand of silver hair under her sable hat. Hands mottled, veins showing, nails ridged: tough claws of an old bird, still flexible, but a better indication of her true age than her harshly lined but firm face, straight back and limber stride. Her knees hurt, but she tried not to let it show, or slow her down.
The camp perimeter was about one kilometre by two. Beyond the far fence she could see straight to the horizon, above which rose the many gantries and the few remaining tall ships of the old port. It had been a proud fleet once. How long before she would have to say, all my ships are gone and all my men are dead?
26 KEN MACLEOD
One of the camp's factories was a couple of hundred metres away, a complex of aluminium pipework and fibre-optic cabling in a queasily organic-looking mass about fifty metres wide and twenty high, through which the control cabins and walkways of the human element were beaded and threaded like the eggs and exudate of some gargantuan insect. The name of the company that owned it, Space Merchants, was spelled out on the roof in twisty neon.
As she approached the nearest workers' housing area it struck Myra, not for the first time, that the huts were more modern and comfortable than the concrete apartment block she lived in herself. Each hut was semi-cylindrical, its rounded ends streamlined to the prevailing wind; soot-black polycarbon skin with rows of laminated-diamond windows.
This particular cluster of accommodation huts was in two rows of ten, with the rutted remains of a twenty metre-wide paved road between them. A gang of a dozen men was engaged in repairing the road; the breeze carried a waft of sweat and tar. The men were using shovels, a gas burner under a tipping-and-spreading contraption, and a coughing diesel-engined road-roller: primitive, heavy equipment. On the sidewalk a blue-suited Mutual Protection guard lounged, picking his teeth and apparently watching a show in his eyes and hearing music or commentary in his ears.
The loom of Myra's shadow made him jump, blink and shake his head with a small shudder. He started to his feet.
'No need to get up,' Myra said unkindly. 'I just want to speak to some of the men.'
'They're on a break, Citizen,' he said, squinting up at her. 'So it's up to them, right?'
THE SKY ROAD 27
* Right,' said Myra. Physical work counted as recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and monitoring that taxed the convicts' nerves.
She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings and explanations: she'd have to wait the few minutes it would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley and let the men take their time finishing their break. She'd always insisted that her arrivals and inspections counted as work-time for the labourers.
Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in. The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to the waist, and were sweating even though the temperature had just climbed above freezing. Most of them were younger - let's face it, far younger - than herself; dark-tanned Koreans and Japanese, muscular as martial arts adepts - which, indeed, some of them were. She enjoyed watching them, the effect of smoke amplifying the underlying undertone of lust, the happy, hippy hormonal hum . . .
But that reminded her of Georgi, and her mood crashed again. Georgi was dead. Sometimes it seemed every man she'd ever fucked was dead; it was like she carried a disease: Niall MacCallum had died in a car crash, Jaime Gonzalez had died - what? - seventy years ago in the contra war, Jon Wilde had died in her arms on the side of the Karaganda road (on snow that turned red as his face turned white), and now Georgi Davidov had died in the consulate at Almaty, of a heart attack. (They expected her to believe thai?)
There had been others, she reminded herself. Quite recent others. It wasn't every man she'd ever fucked who was doomed, it was every man she'd
28 KEN MACLEOD
ever loved. There was only one exception she knew of. All her men were dead, except one, and he was a killer.
Even, perhaps, Georgi's killer. Fucking heart attack, my ass! It was one of their moves, it had to be Ч a move in the endgame.
A door banged open somewhere and the street suddenly swarmed with children pelting along and yelling, their languages and accents as varied as the colours of their skins. Few of the camp's bonded labour-force were women, but many of the men had women with them; there was every inducement for the prisoners to bring their families along. It was humane, but politic as well: a man with a woman and children was unlikely to risk escape or revolt.
Surrounded by children calling to their fathers, poking fingers in the hot asphalt, crowding around the machines and loudly investigating, die gang knocked off at last, leaving the guard to mind the newly tarred road. Myra savoured his disgruntled look as she crushed the filter roach under her heel and stepped out into the centre of the untarred part of the street.
'Hi, guys.'
They all knew who she was, but the only ones among them she recognised were two members of the camp committee, Kim Nok-Yung and Shin Se-Ha. The former was a young Korean shipyard worker, stocky and tough; the latter a Japanese mathematician of slender build and watchful mien. Kim seized her hand, grinning broadly.
'Hello, Myra.'
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