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

"Oh, go to sleep, grandpa!" He closed his eyes and bent his head back until the cords of his neck
quivered. "What is it that makes a golden? A combination of physiological and psychological. . . what?"

"It's primarily some sort of hormonal imbalance as well as an environmentally conditioned
thalamic/personality responseтАФ"

"Yeah. Yeah." His head came down. "And that X-chromosome heredity nonsense they just connected up
with it a few years back. But all I know is they can take the stasis shift from galaxy to galaxy, where you
and I, Vyme, if we get more than twenty thousand light-years off the rim, we're dead."

"Insane at twenty thousand," I corrected. "Dead at twenty-five."

"Same difference." He opened his eyes. They were large, green, and mostly pupil. "You know, I stole a
golden belt once? Rolled it off a staggering slob about a week ago who came out of a bar and collapsed
on the corner. I went across the Pit to Calle-J where nobody knows me and wore it around for a few
hours, just to see if I felt different."

"You did?" Ratlit had lengths of gut that astounded me about once a day.

"I didn't. But people walking around me did. Wearing that two-inch band of yellow metal around my
waist, nobody in the worlds could tell I wasn't a golden, just walking by on the street, without talking to
me awhile, or making hormone tests. And wearing that belt, I learned just how much I hated golden.
Because I could suddenly see, in almost everybody who came by, how much they hated me while I had
that metal belt on. I threw it over the Edge." Suddenly he grinned. "Maybe I'll steal another one."

"You really hate them, Ratlit?"

He narrowed his eyes at me and looked superior.
"Sure, I talk about them," I told him. "Sometimes they're a pain to work for. But it's not their fault we
can't take the reality shift."

"I'm just a child," he said evenly, "incapable of such fine reasoning. I hate them." He looked back at the
night. "How can you stand to be trapped by anything, Vyme?"

Three memories crowded into my head when he said that.

First: I was standing at the railing of the East RiverтАФruns past this New York I was telling you aboutтАФat
midnight, looking at the illuminated dragon of the Manhattan Bridge that spanned the water, then at the
industrial fires flickering in bright, smoky Brooklyn, and then at the template of mercury street lamps
behind me bleaching out the playground and most of Houston Street; then, at the reflections in the water,
here like crinkled foil, there like glistening rubber; at last, looked up at the midnight sky itself. It wasn't
black but dead pink, without a star. This glittering world made the sky a roof that pressed down on me
so I almost screamed. . . . That time the next night I was twenty-seven light-years away from Sol on my
first star-run.

Second: I was visiting my mother after my first few years out. I was looking in the closet for something
when this contraption of plastic straps and buckles fell on my head. "What's this, Ma?" And she smiled
with a look of idiot nostalgia and crooned, "Why that's your little harness, Vymey. Your first father and I
would take you on picnics up at Bear Mountain and put you in that and tie you to a tree with about ten