"John Varley - Persistence Of Vision2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

camps bordering the China Strip. This was only five years after the disaster, remember, when the
Omaha nuclear reactor melted down and a hot mass of uranium and plutonium began eating its way
into the earth, headed for China, spreading a band of radioactivity six hundred kilometers
downwind. Most of Kansas City, Missouri, was still living in plywood and sheet-metal shantytowns
till the city was rendered habitable again.
The refugees were a tragic group. The initial solidarity people show after a great
disaster had long since faded into the lethargy and disillusionment of the displaced person. Many
of them would be in and out of hospitals for the rest of

their. lives. To make it worse, the local people hated them, feared them, would not associate with
them. They .were modern pariahs, unclean. Their children were shunned. Each camp had only a number
to identify it, but the local populace called them all Geigertowns.
I made a long detour to Little Rock to avoid crossing the Strip, though it was safe now as
long as you didn't linger. I was issued a pariah's badge by the National Guard-a dosimeter-and


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wandered from one Geigertown to the next. The people were pitifully friendly once I made the first
move, and I always slept indoors. The food was free at the community messes.
Once at Little Rock, I found that the aversion to picking up strangers--who might be
tainted with "radiation disease"-dropped off, and I quickly moved across Arkansas, Oklahome, and
Texas. I worked a little here and there, but many of the rides were long. What I saw of Texas was
through a car window.
I was a little tired of that by the time I reached New Mexico. I decided to do some more
walking. By then I was leas interested in California than in the trip itself.
I left the roads and went cross-country where there were no fences to stop me. I found
that it wasn't easy, even in New Mexico, to get far from signs of civilization.
Taos was the center, back in the '60's, of cultural experiments in alternative living.
Many communes and cooperatives were set up in the surrounding hills during that time. Most of them
fell apart in a few months or years, but a few survived. In later years, any group with a new
theory of living and a yen to try it out seemed to gravitate to that part of New Mexico. As a
result, the land was dotted with ramshackle windmill, solar heating panels, geodesic domes, group
marriages, nudists, philosophers, theoreticians, messiahs, hermits, and more than a few just plain
nuts.
Taos was great. I could drop into most of the communes and stay for a day or a week,
eating organic rice and beans and drinking goat's milk. When I got tired of one, a few hours' walk
in any direction would bring me to another. There, I might be offered a night of prayer and
chanting or a ritualistic orgy. Some of the groups had spotless barns with automatic milkers for
the herds of cows. Others didn't even have latrines; they just squatted. In some, the members
dressed like nuns, or Quakers in early Pennsylvania. Else-
where, they went nude and shaved all their body hair and painted themselves purple. There were all-
male and allfemale groups. I was urged to stay at most of the former; at the latter, the responses
ranged from a bed for the night and good conversation to being met at a barbed-wire fence with a
shotgun.
I tried not to make judgments. These people were doing something important, all of them.
They were testing ways whereby people didn't have to live in Chicago. That was a wonder to me. I
had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea.
This is not to say they were all successful. Some made Chicago look like Shangri-La. There