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

Below him the spaceliner filled the hanger like a tuber an eighth of a
mile long. The service crew swarmed the floor, moving over the
cement like scattered ball bearings. And the music-

"Hey, kid."

Buddy turned.

Bim swaggered toward him, beating his thigh to the rhythms in the falls
of sound. "I was just looking for you, kid." Buddy was twenty-four, but
people would call him "kid" after he was thirty. He blinked a lot.

"You want to get over and help them haul down that solvent from
upstairs? The damn lift's busted again. I swear, they're going to have a
strike if they don't keep the equipment working right. Ain't safe. Say,
what did you think of the crowd outside this morning?"

"Crowd?" Buddy's drawl snagged on a slight speech defect. "Yeah,
there was a lot of people, huh. I been down in the maintenance shop
since six o'clock, so I guess I must've missed most of it. What was they
here for?"

Bim got a lot of what-are-you-kidding-me on his face. Then it turned to
a tolerant smile. "For Faust." He nodded toward the speaker: the music
halted, lurched, then Bryan Faust's voice roared out for love and the
violent display that would prove it real. "Faust came in this morning,
kid. You didn't know? He's been making it down from moon to moon
through the outer planets. I hear he broke 'em up in the asteroids. He's
been to Mars and the last thing I heard they love him on Luna as much
as anywhere else. He arrived on Earth this morning, and he'll be up and
down the Americas for twelve days." He thumbed toward the pit and
shook his head. "That's his liner." Bim whistled. "And did we have a
hell of a time! All them kids, thousands of 'em, I bet. And people old
enough to know better, too. You should have seen the police! When we
were trying to get the liner in here, a couple of hundred kids got
through the police block. They wanted to pull his ship apart and take
home the pieces. You like his music?"

Buddy squinted toward the speaker. The sounds jammed into his ears,
pried around his mind, loosening things. Most were good things,
touched on by a resolved cadence, a syncopation caught up again,
feelings sounded on too quickly for him to hold, but good feelings.
Still, a few of them ...

Buddy shrugged, blinked. "I like it." And the beat of his heart, his
lungs, and the music coincided. "Yeah. I like that." The music went
faster; heart and breathing fell behind; Buddy felt a surge of disorder.
"But it's ... strange." Embarrassed, he smiled over his broken tooth.

"Yeah. I guess a lot of other people think so too. Well, get over with