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

the oddity of sitting on the right insured that he wouldn't forget the necessity of driving on the left. He
pulled to the curb and perused the Avis street map of London, plotted a course, got back in traffic, and
drove to Camden High Street. He parked below the Dowlands' and went upstairs and packed, then took
his backpack down to the car. He returned to leave a note: Gone to the land of the midnight sun. Then he
went down to the car and drove north, onto the highways and out of London.
It was a wet day, and low full clouds brushed over the land, dropping here a black broom of rain, there a
Blakean shaft of sunlight. The hills were green, and the fields yellow or brown or lighter green. At first
there were a lot of hills, a lot of fields. Then the highway swung by Birmingham and Manchester, and he
drove by fields of rowhouses, line after line after line of them, on narrow treeless streets - all orderly and
neat, and yet still among the bleakest human landscapes he had ever seen. Streets like trenches. Certainly
the world was being overrun. Population densities must be near the levels set in those experiments on rats
which had caused the rats to go insane. It was as good an explanation as any. Mostly males affected, in
both cases: territorial hunters, bred to kill for food, now trapped in little boxes. They had gone mad. "I
believe that Man is this or that," the Edwardian author had written, and why not; it couldn't be denied that
it was mostly men's doing. The planning, the diplomacy, the fighting, the raping, the killing. The obvious
thing to do was to give the running of the world over to women. There was Thatcher in the Falklands and
Indira Gandhi in Bangladesh, it was true; but still it would be worth trying, it could hardly get worse! And
given the maternal instinct, it would probably be better. Give every first lady her husband's job. Perhaps
every woman her man's job. Let the men care for the children, for five thousand years or fifty thousand,
one for every year of murderous patriarchy.
North of Manchester he passed giant radio towers, and something that looked like nuclear reactor
stacks. Fighter jets zoomed overhead. The twentieth century. Why hadn't that Edwardian author been
able to see it coming? Perhaps the future was simply unimaginable, then and always. Or perhaps things
hadn't looked so bad in 1902. The Edwardian, looking forward in a time of prosperity, saw more of the
same; instead there had followed a century of horrors. Now one looked forward from a time of horrors;
so that by analogy, what was implied for the next century was grim beyond measure. And with the new
technologies of destruction, practically anything was possible: chemical warfare, nuclear terrorism,
biological holocaust; victims killed by nano-assassins flying through them, or by viruses in their drinking
supply, or by a particular ringing of their telephone; or reduced to zombies by drugs or brain implants,
torture or nerve gas; or simply dispatched with bullets, or starved; hi tech, low tech, the methods were
endless. And the motivations would be stronger than ever; with populations rising and resources
depleted, people were going to be fighting not to rule, but to survive. Some little country threatened with
defeat could unleash an epidemic against its rival and accidentally kill off a continent, or everyone, it was
entirely possible. The twenty-first century might make the twentieth look like nothing at all.
He would come to after reveries like that and realize that twenty or thirty or even sixty miles had passed
without him seeing a thing of the outside world. Automatic pilot, on roads that were reversed! He tried to
concentrate. He was somewhere above Carlisle. The map showed two possible routes to Edinburgh: one
left the highway just below Glasgow, while a smaller road left sooner and was much more direct. He
chose the direct route and took an exit into a roundabout and onto the A702, a two-lane road heading
northeast. Its black asphalt was wet with rain, and the clouds rushing overhead were dark. After several
miles he passed a sign that said "Scenic Route," which suggested he had chosen th e wrong road, but he
was unwilling to backtrack. It was probably as fast to go this way by now, just more work: frequent
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




roundabouts, villages with traffic lights, and narrow stretches where the road was hemmed by hedges or
walls. Sunset was near, he had been driving for hours; he was tired, and when black trucks rushed at him
out of the spray and shadows it looked like they were going to collide with him head-on. It became an