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

feet of cord so you wouldn't getтАФ" I didn't hear the rest because of the horror that suddenly flooded me,
thinking of myself tied up in that thing. Okay, I was twenty and had just joined that beautiful procreation
group a year back on Sigma and was the proud father of three and expecting two more. The hundred
and sixty-three of us had the whole beach and nine miles of jungle and half a mountain to ourselves;
maybe I was seeing Antoni caught up in that thing, trying to catch a bird or a beetle or a waveтАФwith only
ten feet of cord. I hadn't worn clothes for anything but work in a twelvemonth, and I was chomping to get
away from that incredible place I had grown up in called an apartment and back to wives, husbands,
kids, and civilization. Anyway, it was pretty terrible.

The third? After I had left the proke-groupтАФfled them, I suppose, guilty and embarrassed over
something I couldn't name, still having nightmares once a month that woke me screaming about what was
going to happen to the kids, even though I knew one point of group marriage was to prevent the loss of
one, two, or three parents being traumaticтАФstill wondering if I wasn't making the same mistakes my
parents made, hoping my brood wouldn't turn out like me, or worse like the kids you sometimes read
about in the paper (like Ratlit, though I hadn't met him yet), horribly suspicious that no matter how
different I tried to be from my sires, it was just the same thing all over again. . . . Anyway, I was on the
ship bringing me to the Star-pit for the first time. I'd gotten talking to a golden who, as golden go, was a
pretty regular gal. We'd been discussing inter- and intra-galactic drives. She was impressed I knew so
much. I was impressed that she could use them and know so little. She was digging in a very girl-way the
six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-ten-pound drive mechanic with mildly grimy fingernails that was me. I
was digging in a very boy-way the slim, amber-eyed young lady who had seen it all. From the view deck
we watched the immense, artificial disk of the Star-pit approach, when she turned to me and said, in a
voice that didn't sound cruel at all, "This is as far as you go, isn't it?" And I was frightened all over again,
because I knew that on about nine different levels she was right.

Ratlit said: "I know what you're thinking." A couple of times when he'd felt like being quiet and I'd felt like
talking I may have told him more than I should. "Well, cube that for me, dad. That's how trapped I feel!"

I laughed, and Ratlit looked very young again. "Come on," I said. "Let's take a walk."

"Yeah." He stood. The wind fingered at our hair. "I want to go see Alegra."
"I'll walk you as far as Calle-G," I told him. "Then I'm going to go to bed."

"I wonder what Alegra thinks about this business? I always find Alegra a very good person to talk to," he
said sagely. "Not to put you down, but her experiences are a little more up to date than yours.

You have to admit she has a modern point of view. Plus the fact that she's older." Than Ratlit, anyway.
She was fifteen.

"I don't think being 'trapped' ever really bothered her," I said. 'Which may be a place to take a lesson
from."

By Ratlit's standards Alegra had a few things over me. In my youth kids took to dope in their teens,
twenties. Alegra was born with a three-hundred-milligram-a-day habit on a bizarre narcotic that
combined the psychedelic qualities of the most powerful hallucinogens with the addictiveness of the
strongest depressants. I can sympathize. Alegra's mother was addicted, and the tolerance was passed
with the blood plasma through the placental wall. Ordinarily a couple of complete transfusions at birth
would have gotten the newborn child straight. But Alegra was also a highly projective telepath. She
projected the horrors of birth, the glories of her infantile hallucinated world on befuddled doctors; she
was given her drug. Without too much difficulty she managed to be given her drug every day since.