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

:logged filters of Number Eight Field

requiring full face masks and sealed
netre-wide frame elements. Climbing
les of rung staples to find the air vents
every hundred of the field dome's big
king in the blower's nozzle and becomersonal
storm of red dust. When Wei
.'nt at the top of the dome, he blew his
.d his line to the vent's grid and leaned
W,
Cats was playing some down-home I
 2
PAUL J. McAuLE┬е


rock'n'roll in Lee's earpiece; apart from that he was more
alone than he'd been all winter. This was his first year at
the Bitter Waters danwei, his second as an itinerant agronomist
technician. Already he was chafing to move on
through the emptying landscapes of Mars; if he could he'd
never stop moving until he found his parents or, at least,
found the truth behind his great-grandfather's honeyed evasions.
The librarian program Xiao Bing had built was all very
well, but it searched the other world of the common information
space, not the real world, the world all around him.

The dome curved away on either side of Lee, facets glittering
against the shocking-pink sky. A dozen identical
domes stood in a grid of drainage canals and tracks. Beyond
were the sours, green-brown patches showing through the
thin mantling of red dust, riven by the lightning bolt of the
dry riverbed and spreading north towards the lowlands of
the Plain of Gold. Dust hazed the line between land and sky;
westward, the notch of the Great Valley was hardly visible.
Perhaps he'd travel down it, come summer, to the Paved
Mountain and the strange ecosystem of the Dust Seas, hitch
a ride on a dust skimmer and climb Tiger Mountain...

Shouts floated up,' no louder than the King's music. Directly
below, the others were semaphoring at Lee. Their
shadows made small black oblique strokes against the red
ground. He abseiled all the way down, kicking off lightly
once, twice against structural struts. He just missed the trestle
which carried the water line into the dome and landed
sprawling on his back in a bank of soft dust.

"Make speed, Technician," one of the men shouted as Lee
picked himself up. "Lin Yi is drowning!"