"Samuel R. Delany - Babel - 17" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

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PART
ONE:

RYDRA
WONG

. . . Here is the hub of ambiguity.
Electric spectrums splash across the street.
Equivocation knots the shadowed features
of boys who are not boys; a quirk of darkness
shrivels a full mouth to senility
or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid
across the amber cheek . . -
... or smashes in the pelvic arch
and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest
dispelled with motion or a flare of light
that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood . . .
They say the same crowd surges up the street
and surges down again, like driftwood borne
tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash,
only to slap into the sand again,
only to be jerked out and spun away.
Driftwood; me narrow hips, and liquid eyes,
the widefiung shoulders and the rough-cast hands,
the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey.
The colors disappear at break of day
when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet
young sailors ambling shipward on the street . . .

тАФfrom Prism and Lens, M -H,

IT'S A PORT CITY.

Here fumes mst the sky, the'General thought. Indus-
trial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons,
purples with too much red. West, ascending and de-
scending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellarcenters
and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It's a rotten poor
city too, thought the General, turning the comer by the
garbage-strewn curb.

Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months
apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse
with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered,
how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he'd
asked himself that. Answer? It couldn't.

Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalismтАФ