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

"Ho! Understand who is the master!"

Guoquiang and Xiao Bing had heard Lee shout, and now
they shouted at him, asking how he knew he was smarter,
asking who was leading who. Xiao Bing said, "We'd be better
off if the bact set the traps and Wei Lee carried the gear!"

Lee laughed, and said, "I think maybe you should carry
the gear. This bact is not so dumb he could mistake heroic
opera for art, and I can lay out traps in my sleep."

Guoquiang said, "Thank you for enlightenment! Now I
know that only bacts and contract workers are dumb enough


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to pay attention to the King of the Cats and his old-fashioned
anarchist propaganda."
"Oh! You know very well I like the historical King, not
some machine floating in Jupiter who thinks it's the King,
reborn all over again. No, I like the real one, the one who
was born in a stable and became a planet-wide media star,
who was exiled to the Moon and returned a hero after leading
a revolution against the tyranny of Colonel Parker, who
was crucified upon a burning cross, and returned as a thousand
acolytes who surgically altered themselves to look exactly
like him."
"And who could raise the dead, and turn water into wine,"
Xiao Bing said.
"I can turn wine into water," Guoquiang said. "The trick
is finding the wine."
"I may be dumb," Lee insisted, "but I wouldn't mistake
historical reality for the construct who jockeys the show."
"But you listen to it, all the same," Guoquiang said. "A
contradiction there, Wei Lee."
"Not at all! I just like the songs he plays. I'm smart
enough to know they mean something. Nothing in those
operas could ever happen in the real world."
"That's the point," Guoquiang said amiably.
"And if you're so smart," Xiao Bing said, "why are you
slogging through this stuff with us?"
"Oh! I don't mind this."
For most of the afternoon the three had been picking a
path through the marshy saltpans of the sours. Low black
willows and tenacious soldier grasses grew along the ragged
cuts of sandclogged irrigation ditches; slimes and moulds
threw up wrinkled stinking banks that slumped into sands