"Samuel R. Delany - The Star Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

After two divorces, my mother ran off with a salesman and left me and four siblings with an alcoholic aunt
for a year. Yeah, they still have divorces, monogamous marriages and stuff like that where I was born.
Like I say, it's pretty primitive. I left home at fifteen, made it through vocational school on my own, and
learned enough about what makes things fly to end upтАФafter that disastrous marriage I told you about
earlierтАФwith my own repair hangar on the Star-pit.

Compared with Ratlit I had a stable childhood. That's right, he lost the last parent he remembered when
he was six. At seven he was convicted of his first felonyтАФafter escaping from Creton VII. But part of his
treatment at hospital cum reform school cum prison was to have the details lifted from his memory. "Did
something to my head back there. That's why I never could learn to read, I think." For the next couple of
years he ran away from one foster group after the other. When he was eleven, some guy took him home
from Play Planet where he'd been existing under the boardwalk on discarded hot dogs, souvlakia, and
falafel. "Fat, smoked perfumed cigarettes; name was Vivian?" Turned out to be the publisher. Ratlit
stayed for three months, during which time he dictated a novel to Vivian. "Protecting my honor," Ratlit
explained. "I had to do something to keep him busy."

The book sold a few hundred thousand copies as a precocious curiosity among many. But Ratlit had
split. The next years he was involved as a shill in some illegality I never understood. He didn't either. "But
I bet I made a million, Vyme! I earned at least a million." It's possible. At thirteen he still couldn't read or
write, but his travels had gained him fair fluency in three languages. A couple of weeks ago he'd
wandered off a stellar tramp, dirty and broke, here at the Star-pit. And I'd gotten him a job as grease
monkey over at Poloscki's.

He leaned his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands. "Vyme, it's a shame."
"What's a shame, kid-boy?"

"To be washed up at my age. A has-been! To have to grapple with the fact that thisтАФ" he spat at a star
"тАФis it."

He was talking about golden again.

"You still have a chance." I shrugged. "Most of the time it doesn't come out till puberty."

He cocked his head up at me. "I've been pubescent since I was nine, buster."

"Excuse me."

"I feel cramped in, Vyme. There's all that night out there to grow up in, to explore."

"There was a time," I mused, "when the whole species was confined to the surface, give or take a few
feet up or down, of a single planet. You've got the whole galaxy to run around in. You've seen a lot of it,
yeah. But not all."

"But there are billions of galaxies out there. I want to see them. In all the stars around here there hasn't
been one life form discovered that's based on anything but silicon or carbon. I overheard two golden in a
bar once, talking: there's something in some galaxy out there that's big as a star, neither dead nor alive,
and sings. I want to hear it, Vyme!"

"Ratlit, you can't fight reality."