Death's End полностью

The rails were leftovers from an earlier age, since everyone now relied on individual tiny thrusters which could be worn on the belt or over the shoulders. They generated enough thrust to propel people around in weightlessness, controlled by a handheld remote. Cheng Xin’s companions tried to give her a first lesson in space—how to use the weightless thrusters. But Cheng Xin preferred to navigate around by grabbing on to the guardrails. As they arrived at the exit to the main hall, Cheng Xin paused to admire a few propaganda posters on the wall. These were ancient, and most of them dealt with the construction of the Solar System defense system. In one of the posters, a soldier’s figure filled most of the image. He was dressed in a uniform unfamiliar to Cheng Xin, and his fiery eyes stared at the viewer. Below him was a line of large text: The Earth needs you! Next to it was an even larger poster in which people of all races and nationalities stood, arms linked, to form a dense wall. Behind them, the blue flag of the UN took up most of the picture. The text on the poster read: Let us build a new Great Wall for the Solar System with our flesh! Although Cheng Xin was interested in the posters, they didn’t feel familiar. They seemed to harken back to an older style, reminding people of an age before she had even been born.

“These were from the beginning of the Great Ravine,” one of the PDC officials traveling with her said.

That had been a brief, despotic age, when the whole world had been militarized before everything, from faith to life, collapsed…. But why had these posters been kept until now? To remember, or to forget?

Cheng Xin and the others exited the main hall into a long corridor, whose cross section was also circular. The corridor extended ahead of her for some distance, and she couldn’t see to the end. She knew that this was one of the five radial spokes of the station. At first, they moved in total weightlessness, but soon, “gravity” appeared, in the form of centrifugal force. At first, the force was very weak, but it was enough to induce a sense of up and down: the corridor suddenly turned into a deep well, and instead of floating, they were falling. Cheng Xin felt dizzy, but many guardrails protruded from the wall of the “well.” If she felt she was falling too fast, she could decelerate by grabbing on to one of the rails.

They passed the intersection between the spoke and the first ring. Cheng Xin looked to the right and left, and saw that the ground rose up on both sides, as though she were at the bottom of a valley. Over the entrances to the ring on both sides were red-glowing signs: First Ring, Gravity 0.15G. The wall of the curved corridor of the ring was punctuated by multiple doors, which opened and closed from time to time. Cheng Xin saw many pedestrians. They stood on the floor of the ring due to the microgravity, but they still moved by leaping ahead with the aid of the weightless thrusters.

After passing through the first ring, the weight increased further, and free-falling was no longer safe. Escalators appeared on the wall of the “well,” one going up and one going down. Cheng Xin observed the passengers riding up and saw that they were dressed casually, indistinguishable from Earth dwellers. The wall of the well had many information windows of different sizes, and more than a few of them were broadcasting the image of Cheng Xin stepping onto the space elevator more than twenty hours ago. But at the moment, Cheng Xin’s four escorts surrounded her, and she was also wearing her wide-framed sunglasses. No one recognized her.