"RESNICK, Mike - The Land of Nod" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

blotted out by enormous mock-Tudor and mock-Victorian and mock-
Colonial and mock-contemporary houses, interspersed with needle-
like apartment buildings that reached up to stab the clouds.
I had no desire to speak to Edward or Susan, for they would
question me endlessly about where I had been. My son would once
again warn me about the thieves and muggers who prey on old men
after dark in Nairobi, and my daughter-in-law would try to subtly
suggest that I would be warmer in a coat and pants. So I went past
their house and walked aimlessly through the enclave until all the
lights in the house had gone out. When I was sure they were
asleep, I went to a side door and waited for the security system
to identify my retina and skeletal structure, as it had on so many
similar nights. Then I quietly made my way to my room.
Usually I dreamed of Kirinyaga, but this night the image of
Ahmed haunted my dreams. Ahmed, eternally confined by a force
field; Ahmed, trying to imagine what lay beyond his tiny
enclosure; Ahmed, who would live and die without ever seeing
another of his own kind.
And gradually, my dream shifted to myself: to Koriba,
attached by invisible chains to a Nairobi he could no longer
recognize; Koriba, trying futilely to mold Kirinyaga into what it
might have been; Koriba, who once led a brave exodus of the Kikuyu
until one day he looked around and found that he was the only
Kikuyu remaining.
* * *
In the morning I went to visit my daughter on Kirinyaga --
not the terraformed world, but the _real_ Kirinyaga, which is now
called Mount Kenya. It was here that Ngai gave the digging-stick
to Gikuyu, the first man, and told him to work the earth. It was
here that Gikuyu's nine daughters became the mothers of the nine
tribes of the Kikuyu, here that the sacred fig tree blossomed. It
was here, millennia later, that Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning
Spear of the Kikuyu, would invoke Ngai's power and send the Mau
Mau out to drive the white man back to Europe.
And it was here that a steel-and-glass city of five million
inhabitants sprawled up the side of the holy mountain. Nairobi's
overstrained water and sewer system simply could not accomodate
any more people, so the government offered enormous tax incentives
to any business that would move to Kirinyaga, in the hope that the
people would follow them -- and the people accomodated them.
Vehicles spewed pollution into the atmosphere, and the noise
of the city at work was deafening. I walked to the spot where the
fig tree had once stood; it was now covered by a lead foundry. The
slopes where the bongo and the rhinoceros once lived were hidden
beneath the housing projects. The winding mountain streams had all
been diverted and redirected. The tree beneath which Deedan
Kimathi had been killed by the British was only a memory, its
place taken by a fast food restaurant. The summit had been turned
into a park, with tram service leading to a score of souvenir
shops.