"Maxine McArthur - Times Past" - читать интересную книгу автора (McArthur Maxine)

Antony Searle; the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild--thanks everyone;
Bruce Missingham, for the inspiration of his thesis on the real
Assembly of the Poor; Marianne de Courtenay, always there; Brad,
"Fixing it is only a way to show you understand how it works"; my
family, who never complained; and all my other friends who helped in
ways they probably don't want to know about. Most of all, thank you to
Tomoko, for showing me what had to be written.
 Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived
forwards.

--Niels Bohr
TIME PAST
One

The maze of paths stretched around me. I was lost. Tents and shacks
crowded onto narrow dirt tracks. Piles of decomposing rubbish blocked
some tracks. I tried to pick up my direction by the sun blazing across
the river, but it was too late in the day. In this month of April 2023
tent cities occupied river banks all over Sydney. The out-towns, as
they called these barrios, also sprouted in the former parks and sports
fields of the suburbs as the poor and homeless were forced out of the
inner city by rings of police checkpoints that kept the rich and
privileged safe. If you walked from the out-town through the factories
of Rhodes, across the murky Parramatta River, through the red-roofed,
drug-sodden streets of Meadowbank, and up the slope; if there was
enough wind to disperse the brown blanket of pollution, then above the
hills and roofs of the suburbs you might see the city towers penciled
against the sky. Over there lived the people who said in opinion
polls, illegal immigrants deserve to live like animals. Illegal
immigrants like myself. I'd bet nobody had come as far as I had--in
time, or in space. As I retraced my steps, hoping I was heading east,
people began to wander out of shacks to sit in front of them or stand
chatting in the cooler evening air. A child struggled with a
half-full bucket of water as she crossed the lane ahead of me. Three
men standing beside an open doorway watched me all the way down that
lane. I felt a prickle of fear between my shoulders until I left their
gaze behind.

I didn't stand out physically--we all wore ragged T-shirts and either
trousers or sarongs, and my space-pale skin had tanned in five months
of exposure to the savage sun. What worried me was that I was carrying
cash, with which I'd intended buying a black market laser, only the
seller hadn't shown up at our rendezvous. I felt everybody could see
the tattered plastic notes in my pocket.

I wasn't used to carrying money. In my century, food, water and
shelter are basic rights, not something that must be bought.

This part of the out-town stank of petroleum. It was built on concrete
slabs that used to house a refinery. The slabs were stained with dark