"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

and the suit had produced better boots, socks, etc. than anything here. But I couldnтАЩt pass up the
chance of an amazing penknife with a red handle marked with an inlaid steel cross within a shield.
It had two blades and a lot of ingenious tools. I was sure IтАЩd find a use for most of them.
I said goodbye to the children, promised to pass on anything I didnтАЩt use (with a mental
reservation about the knife), and stepped out again into the sunlight. After a few seconds I went
back inside and picked up a pair of sunglasses. The girlтАЩs laughter followed me out.
Now that I didnтАЩt have to screw up my eyes to look up, it was easy to work out the location of
the airport from the paths of the airships and microlights and helicopters. I followed the coast road
for a couple of miles until I reached it. I got several offers of lifts on the way, but I declined them
all. Despite the heat, and the gravity, and the moments of disorientation when some conservative
part of my brain decided the horizon just could not be that far away, I had to get used to walking in
the open on the surface of this planet; and soon, to my surprise, I found that I enjoyed it. The sea
breeze carried the homely scent of blue-green fields, the distant converters shimmered and
hummed, the nearby waters within the artificial reef sparkled, and on them swimmers and boating-
parties filled the air with joyous cries.
The airport was on a spit of land that extended a few hundred yards, traversing the reef-barrier.
Airships wallowed at mooring masts, тАЬcopters and microlights buzzed between them. High
overhead, the diamond-fibre flying-wings used for serious lifting strained at their cables like
gigantic kites. I had arrived on one, from the Guine spaceport, and it looked as if IтАЩd have to leave
on one. The thought of an airship passage was appealing, but it would take too long. I didnтАЩt know
how much time I had to spare, but the final deadline, the Impact Event, was less than three weeks
away. Whatever I did had to be done before that.
Just before the airport perimeter fence I turned and looked back at the Casa Azores. From here
it was possible to see it, if not take it all in. A hundred and fifty metres square at the base, tapering
in its kilometre height to a hundred at the top. The sides looked oddly natural, covered by climbing
plants and hanging gardens, pocked by glider-ports, and by window-bays which shone like ice.
Built and maintained by quadrillions of organically engineered nanomachines, it was almost as
remarkable as a tree, and a good deal more efficient. The way of life that it and the surrounding
aquaculture sustained was not mine, but it was one I was happy to protect. Plenty of interesting
work, and plenty of interesting leisure; adventure if you wanted it, ease if you preferred that.
Indefinitely extended youth and health. Anything that you couldnтАЩt get for the asking you could,
with some feasible commitment of time and trouble, nanofacture for yourself.
The paucity of broadcast media, and the difficulties of real-time communication, were the only
losses from the world before the Fall and the Crash. We had tried to make it an opportunity. All
the entertainment and knowledge to be found among thirty billion people was (eventually)
available on pipe, and live action provided by the steady, casual arrival and departure of
entertainers and researchers and lecturers. The absence of artificial celebrity meant the endless
presence of surprise.
Throughout the Inner System Earth, near-Earth, Lagrange, Luna, Mars, and the Belt variants of
this same way of life went on. Cultures and languages were more diverse than ever, but the system
that underpinned them was the same everywhere. In floating cities, in artificial mountains stepped
like ziggurats, in towers like this or taller, in towns below the ground, in huge orbital habitats, in
sunlit pressure domes, in caves of ice, most people had settled into this lifestyle: simple, self-
sufficient, low-impact, and ecologically sound.
It was sustainable materially and psychologically, a climax community of the human species, the
natural environment of a conscious animal, which that conscious animal, after so much time and
trouble, had at last made for itself. We called it the Heliocene Epoch. It seemed like a moment in
the sun, but there was no reason, in principle, why it couldnтАЩt outlast the sun, and spread to all the
suns of the sky.
With our solar mirrors we controlled the polar caps. The glaciations and mass extinctions that