"Delany, Samuel R - The Einstein Intersection 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

He grinned.
Then two very friendly dragons came galumphing and moaning between us. Sweat slopped into my eyes and my armpits felt oiled. The harness made it a little easier on my inner thighs; they got raw slow 'stead of quick. I could hardly see and was playing it more by ear than eye when Spider called, "Back on course! City up ahead!"
I looked up but fresh sweat flooded my eyes and the heat made everything waver. I drove dragons. The gorse lessened, and we started down.
Earth crumbled under their claws. With no vegetation to blunt the temperature, the sun stuck gold needles in the backs of our necks. Reflected heat from the ground. At last, sand.
The dragons had to slow. Spider paused beside me to thumb sweat from his eyes. "We usually take McClellan Avenue," he told me as he looked across the dunes. "But I think we're closer to Main Street. This hits McClellan a few miles out. We'll stop at the intersection and rest until nightfall." The dragons hissed out across the city sands. Swamp creatures, they were not used to this dry-ness. As we plowed the ancient place, silent and furious

with hundreds of beasts, I remember crossing a moment of untimed horror, when through void buff I imagined myself surrounded of a sudden, crowded by millions, straited by walls, sooty, fuming, roaring with the dread, dead old race of the planet.
I flailed my whip and beat away the notion. The sun ground its light into the sand.
Two dragons began to annoy each other and I flicked them apart. They snatched at my lash indignantly, missed. My breath filed my throat. Yet, as the two moved away, I realized I was grinning. Alone, we toiled through the day, content and terrified.


Slipped from the night waters of the Adriatic and now we skirt down the strait towards Piraeus. At the horizon right and left monstrously beautiful mountains gnaw the sky. The ship is easy on the morning. The speakers give up French, English, and Greek pop music. Sun silvers the hosed deck, burns over the smokestack. Bought deck passage; big and bold last night I walked into a cabin and slept beautifully. Back outside this morning I wonder what effect Greece will have on TE1. The central subject of the book is myth. This music is so appropriate for the world I float on. I was aware how well it fitted the capsulated life of New York. Its torn harmonies are even more congruent with the rest of the world. How can I take Lobey into the center of this bright chaos propelling these sounds? Drank late with the Greek sailors last night; in bad Italian and worse Greek we talked about myths. Taiki learned the story of Orpheus not from school or reading but from his aunt in Eleusis. Where, shall I go to learn it? The sailors my age wanted to hear pop English and French music on the portable radio. The older ones wanted to hear the traditional Greek songs. "Demotic songs!" exclaimed Demo, "All the young men in the words want to die as soon as possible because love has treated them badly!"
"Not so with Orpheus," Taiki said, a little mysteriously, a little high.
Did Orpheus want to live after he lost Eurydice the second time? He had a very modern choice to make when he decided to look back. What is its musical essence?
Author's Journal: Gulf of Corinth, November 1965

I drive fine dragons for a fine dragon lord, a lord of fine dragons and his dragon horde.
Green-eye sang that silently as we dropped from our mounts. For the first time in my life I caught words as well as melody. It surprised me and I turned to stare. But he was loosening the harness on his beast.
The sky was blue glass. West, clouds smudged the evening with dirty yellow. The dragons threw long shadows on the sand. Coals glowed in the makeshift fireplace. Batt was cooking already.
"McClellan and Main," Spider said. "Here we are."
"How can you tell? " I asked.
"I've been here before."
"Oh."
The dragons had more or less decided we were really stopping. Many lay down.
My mount (whom I had inadvertently named something unprintable; a day's repetition had stabilized the monicker. Therefore we must call him: My Mount) nuzzled my neck affectionately, nearly knocked me down, then dropped his chin to the sand, folded his forelegs, and let his hinder parts fall where they might. That's how dragons do it. Sit down I mean.
Ten steps and I didn't think I would walk again. I tied my whip around my waist, went as close to the food as I could without stepping on anybody, and sat. The exhausted muscles of my legs sagged like water bags. Supplies and equipment were piled to one side. Spider lay down on top of them with one hand hanging down over the edge. I stared at his hand across the fire: because it was in front of me, that's all. And I learned a few things about Spider.
It was large, hung from a knobbly wrist. -The skin between thumb and forefinger was cracked like stone, and the ridges of his knuckles were filled with sweat dampened dirt. A bar of callous banded the front of his palm before the abruptness of his fingers-that was all hard dragon work. But also, on the middle finger at the first knuckle was a callous facing the forefinger. That comes from holding a writing tool. La Dire has such a callous and I asked her about it once. Third, on the tips of his fingers (but not his thumb. It was a left hand) there were smooth shiny spots: those you get from playing a stringed instrument, guitar, violin, maybe cello? Sometimes when I play with other people I notice them. So Spider herds dragons. And he writes. And he plays music....
While I sat there, it occurred to me how hard breathing was.
I began to think about trees.
I had a momentary nightmare that Batt was going to give us something as difficult to eat as hardshell crabs and steamed artichokes.
I leaned on Green-eye's shoulder and slept.
I think he slept too.
I woke when Batt lifted the cover from the stew pot. The odor pried my mouth open, reached down my throat, took hold of my stomach and twisted. I wasn't sure if it was pleasurable or painful. I just sat, working my jaws, my throat aching. I leaned forward over my knees and clutched sand.
Batt ladled stew into pans, stopping now and then to shake hair out of his eyes. I wondered how much hair was in the stew. I didn't care, mind you. Just curious. He passed the steaming tins and I rested mine in the hollow of my crossed legs. A charred loaf of bread came around. Knife broke open a piece and the fluffy innards popped through a gold streak on the crust. When I twisted some off, I realized the fatigue in my arms and shoulders and almost started laughing. I was too tired to eat, too hungry to sleep. With the paradox both sleeping and eating left the category of pleasure, where I'd always put them, and became duties on this crazy job I'd somehow got into. I sopped gravy on my bread, put it into my mouth, bit, and trembled.
I shoved down half my meal before I realized it was too hot. Hungry like I was hungry, hungry beyond need -it's frightening to be that hungry.
Green-eye was shoving something into his mouth with his thumb.
That was the only other human thing I was aware of during the meal till Stinky spluttered, "Gimme some more! "
When I got my seconds, I managed to slow down enough to look around. You can tell about people from the way they eat. I remember the dinner Nativia had cooked us. Oh, eating were something else back then-a day ago, two days?
"You know," Batt grunted, watching his food go, "you got dessert coming."
"Where?" Knife asked, finishing his second helping and reaching out of the darkness for the bread.

"You have some more food-food first," Batt said, " 'cause I'm damned if you're gonna eat up my dessert that fast." He leaned over, swiped Knife's pan from him, filled it, and those gray hands closed on the tin edge and withdrew into the shadow again. The sound of dogged chewing.
Spider, silent till now, looked with blinking silver eyes. "Good stew, cook."
Batt leered.
Spider who herds dragons; Spider who writes; Spider who has the multiplicated music of Kodaly in his head- good man to receive a compliment from.
I looked from Spider to Batt and back. I wished I had said Good stew because it was, and because saying it made Batt grin like that. What I did come out with, the words distorted by that incredible lash of hunger, was: "What's dessert?"
I guess Spider was a bigger person than me. Like I say, that sort of hunger is scary.
Batt took a ceramic dish out of the fire with rags. "Blackberry dumplings. Knife, reach me the rum sauce."
I heard Green-eye's breath change tempo. My mouth got wet all over again. I watched-examined Batt spooning dumplings and berry filling on to the pans.
"Knife, get your fingers out!"