"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

absolutes, isn't it," Rog said gently. "True," he said. "It is." And he drank his wine. He wanted to go on:
True, he wanted to say, any death is an absolute disaster, even that of an infant too young to know what
was happening; but what if you had spent your life raising six such children and then went out one
morning and found their heads on your lawn? Isn't the one more absolute than the other? He was drunk,
his head hurt, his body still vibrated with the day's drive, and the shock of the brush with the lorry; and it
seemed likely that the dyslexia of exhaustion had invaded all his thinking, including his moral sense,
making everything backward. So he clamped his teeth together and concentrated on the wine, his fork
humming in his hand, his glass chattering against his teeth. The room was dark.
Afterwards Alec stopped at the door to his building and shook his head. "Not ready for that yet," he
said. "Let's try Preservation Hall, it's your kind of thing on Wednesday nights. Traditional jazz." Frank
and Andrea had been fans of traditional jazz. "Any good?" "Good enough for tonight, eh?" The pub was
within walking distance, down a wide cobblestone promenade called the Grassmarket, then up Victoria
Street. At the door of the pub they were stopped; there was a cover charge, the usual band had been
replaced by a buffet dinner and concert, featuring several different bands. Proceeds to go to the family of
a Glasgow musician, recently killed in a car crash. "Jesus Christ," Frank exclaimed, feeling like a curse.
He turned to go. "Might as well try it," Alec said, and pulled out his wallet. "I'll pay." "But we've already
eaten." Alec ignored him and gave the man twenty pounds. "Come on." Inside, a very large pub was
jammed with people, and an enormous buffet table stacked with meats, breads, salads, seafood dishes.
They got drinks from the bar and sat at the end of a crowded picnic table. It was noisy, the Scots
accents so thick that Frank understood less than half of what he heard. A succession of local acts took
the stage: the traditional jazz band that usually played, a stand-up comedian, a singer of Forties' music hall
songs, a country-western group. Alec and Frank took turns going to the bar to get refills. Frank watched
the bands and the crowd. All ages and types were represented. Each band said something about the late
musician, who apparently had been well-known, a young rocker and quite a hellion from the sound of it.
Crashed driving home drunk after a gig, and no one a bit surprised. About midnight an obese young man
seated at their table, who had been stealing food from all the plates around him, rose whalelike and
surged to the stage. People cheered as he joined the band setting up. He picked up a guitar, leaned into
the mike, and proceeded to rip into a selection of r&b and early rock and roll. He and his band were the
best group yet, and the pub went wild. Most of the crowd got to their feet and danced in place. Next to
Frank a young punk had to lean over the table to answer a gray-haired lady's questions about how he
kept his hair spiked. A Celtic wake, Frank thought, and downed his cider and howled with the rest as the
fat man started up Chuck Berry's "Rock And Roll Music." So he was feeling no pain when the band
finished its last encore and he and Alec staggered off into the night, and made their way home. But it had
gotten a lot colder while they were inside, and the streets were dark and empty. Preservation Hall was no
more than a small wooden box of light, buried in a cold stone city. Fran k looked back in its direction
and saw that a streetlight reflected off the black cobblestones of the Grassmarket in such a way that there
were thousands of brief white squiggles underfoot, looking like names engraved on black granite, as if the
whole surface of the earth were paved by a single memorial.
The next day he drove north again, across the Forth Bridge and then west along the shores of a loch to
Fort William, and north from there through the Highlands. Above Ullapool steep ridges burst like fins out
of boggy treeless hillsides. There was water everywhere, from puddles to lochs, with the Atlantic itself
visible from most high points. Out to sea the tall islands of the Inner Hebrides were just visible. He
continued north. He had his sleeping bag and foam pad with him, and so he parked in a scenic overlook,
and cooked soup on his Bluet stove, and slept in the back of the car. He woke with the dawn and drove
north. He talked to nobody. Eventually he reached the northwest tip of Scotland and was forced to turn
east, on a road bordering the North Sea. Early that evening he arrived in Scrabster, at the northeast tip of
Scotland. He drove to the docks, and found that a ferry was scheduled to leave for the Orkney Islands