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

whole world into a war economy. At first 1989 had looked like a break away from that. But now, just
seven years later, the Cold War losers all looked like Germany in 1922, their money worthless, their
shelves empty, their democracies crumbling to juntas. Except this time the juntas had corporate sponsors;
multinational banks ran the old Soviet bloc just as they did the Third World, with "austerity measures"
enforced in the name of "the free market," meaning half the world went to sleep hungry every night to pay
off debts to millionaires. While temperatures still rose, populations still soared, "local conflicts" still burned
in twenty different places. One morning Frank lingered over cereal, reluctant to leave the flat. He opened
the Guardian and read that the year's defense budgets worldwide would total around a trillion dollars.
"More light," he said, swallowing hard. It was a dark, rainy day. He could feel his pupils enlarging,
making the effort. The days were surely getting shorter, even though it was May; and the air was getting
darker, as if London's Victorian fogs had returned, coal smoke in the fabric of reality. He flipped the
page and started an article on the conflict in Sri Lanka. Singhalese and Tamils had been fighting for a
generation now, and some time in the previous week, a husband and wife had emerged from their house
in the morning to find the heads of their six sons arranged on their lawn. He threw the paper aside and
walked through soot down the streets.
He got to the British Museum on automatic pilot. Waiting for him at the top of the stack was a book
containing estimates of total war deaths for the century. About a hundred million people. He found
himself on the dark streets of London again, thinking of numbers. All day he walked, unable to gather his
thoughts. And that night as he fell asleep the calculations returned, in a dream or a hypnogogic vision: it
would take two thousand Vietnam Memorials to list the century's war dead. From above he saw himself
walking the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the whole park from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial was
dotted with the black Vs of Vietnam Memorials, as if a flock of giant stealth birds had landed on it. All
night he walked past black wing walls, moving west toward the white tomb on the river.
The next day the first book on the stack concerned the war between China and Japan, 1931-1945. Like
most of Asian history this war was poorly remembered in the West, but it had been huge. The whole
Korean nation became in effect a slave labor camp in the Japanese war effort, and the Japanese
concentration camps in Manchuria had killed as many Chinese as the Germans had killed Jews. These
deaths included thousands in the style of Mengele and the Nazi doctors, caused by "scientific" medical
torture. Japanese experimenters had for instance performed transfusions in which they drained Chinese
prisoners of their blood and replaced it with horses' blood, to see how long the prisoners would live.
Survival rates varied from twenty minutes to six hours, with the subjects in agony throughout. Frank
closed that book and put it down. He picked the next one out of the gloom and peered at it. A heavy old
thing, bound in dark green leather, with a dull gold pattern inlaid on the spine and boards. A History of
the Nineteenth Century, with Illustrations - the latter tinted photos, their colors faded and dim. Published
in 1902 by George Newnes Ltd; last century's equivalent of his own project, apparently. Curiosity about
that had caused him to request the tide. He opened it and thumbed through, and on the last page the text
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




caught his eye: "I believe that Man is good. I believe that we stand at the dawn of a century that will be
more peaceful and prosperous than any in history."
He put down the book and left the British Museum. In a red phone box he located the nearest car rental
agency, an Avis outlet near Westminster. He took the Tube and walked to this agency, and there he
rented a blue Ford Sierra station wagon. The steering wheel was on the right, of course. Frank had never
driven in Great Britain before, and he sat behind the wheel trying to hide his uneasiness from the agent.
The clutch, brake, and gas pedal were left-to-right as usual, thank God. And the gear shift was arranged
the same, though one did have to operate it with the left hand. Awkwardly he shoved the gearshift into
first and drove out of the garage, turning left and driving down the left side of the street. It was weird. But