"Paul Mcauley - Red Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

then you roll. And then you and Li Mei start paying child
tax."

Lee blushed, and Guoquiang laughed. "There are no secrets
amongst citizens, at least, not in winter. Come on,
we've a way to go."

In two minutes they were packed and on the move again,
climbing a slope of loose stones and frosty dust that rose up
to the horizon line, where a square boulder big and black
as a locomotive jutted against the pink sky.

They were climbing a collapsed cliff towards the first terrace
of the ancient river valley. Three billion years ago a vast
flood had carved the Red Valley, cutting a channel a kilometer
deep and three kilometers wide at the point where it
entered the lowlands of the Plain of Gold. In the past few
centuries the warming of the world had restarted the release
of water from aquifers in the badlands, but only enough to
create a sluggish trickle, white with salts, that dried out
completely in winter. Now it was spring, but the alkaline
river which had given the Bitter Waters danwei its name
had not yet started to run. A bad omen.

Halfway up the slope, the cadres turned as one and saw
the settlement framed by the red walls of the valley, small
and far. Domes glittered in the brilliant sunlight. Stepped
cliffs rose on the other side of the braided river channel to
the cratered high plain.

The three grinned at each other, and then they were running.
Lee hauled at the bact's halter until it broke into a
sullen knock-kneed trot. Freedom, they suddenly all felt it.
 14
PAUL J. McAULEY

Their feet kicked dry dust high into the still air, and when
they all reached the top and turned they saw far downhill a
drifting red sheet that twisted into three ropes pointing to
the ridge where they stood, gasping for breath.

Lee started to babble as soon as he got his breath back,
asking his friends to imagine the terraces cloaked in pine
forest, dark green rhododendrons. Grass pastures either side
of a wide clear river, a waterfall plunging into a foaming
pool. Water, that was all that was needed: the water locked
in the poles and in the vast buried permafrost reservoirs
untapped by the world's failed warming. It could still happen.
It was not too late.