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

Corona

by Samuel R. Delany


Pa ran off to Mars Colony before Buddy was born. Momma drank. At
sixteen Buddy used to help out in a 'copter repair shop outside St.
Gable below Baton Rouge. Once he decided it would be fun to take a
'copter, some bootleg, a girl named Dolores-jo, and sixty-three dollars
and eighty-five cents to New Orleans. Nothing taken had ever, by any
interpretation, been his. He was caught before they raised from the
garage roof. He lied about his age at court to avoid the indignity of
reform school. Momma, when they found her, wasn't too sure ("Buddy?
Now, let me see, that's Laford. And James Robert Warren-I named him
after my third husband who was not living with me at the time-now
little James, he came along in ... two thousand and thirty-two, I do
believe. Or thirty-four-you sure now, it's Buddy?") when he was born.
The constable was inclined to judge him younger than he was, but let
him go to grown-up prison anyway. Some terrible things happened
there. When Buddy came out three years later he was a gentler person
than before; still, when frightened, he became violent. Shortly he
knocked up a waitress six years his senior. Chagrined, he applied for
emigration to one of Uranus's moons. In twenty years, though, the
colonial economy had stabilized. They were a lot more stringent with
applicants than in his Pa's day: colonies had become almost
respectable. They'd started barring people with jail records and things
like that. So he went to New York instead and eventually got a job as
an assistant servicer at the Kennedy spaceport.

There was a nine-year-old girl in a hospital in New York at that time
who could read minds and wanted to die. Her name was Lee.

Also there was a singer named Bryan Faust.




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Slow, violent, blond Buddy had been at Kennedy over a year when
Faust's music came. The songs covered the city, sounded on every
radio, filled the title selections on every jukebox and Scopitone. They
shouted and whispered and growled from the wall speaker in the
spacehanger. Buddy ambled over the catwalk while the crossrhythms,
sudden silences, and moments of pure voice were picked up by jangling
organ, whining oboe, bass and cymbals. Buddy's thoughts were small
and slow. His hands, gloved in canvas, his feet in rubber boots, were
big and quick.