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

Once I considered returning. But there was another war, and suddenly there wasn't anything to return to.
Some of the group got out alive. Antoni and his ma didn't. I mean there wasn't even any water left on the
planet.



When I finally came to the Star-pit, myself, I hadn't had a drink in years. But working there out on the
galaxy's edge did something to meтАФsomething to the part that grows I'd once talked about on the beach
with Antoni.

If it did it to me, it's not surprising it did it to Ratlit and the rest.

(And I remember a black-eyed creature pressed against the plastic wall, staring across impassable
sands.)

Perhaps it was knowing this was as far as you could go.

Perhaps it was the golden.
Golden? I hadn't even joined the group yet when I first heard the word. I was sixteen and a sophomore
at Luna Vocational. I was born in a city called New York on a planet called Earth. Luna is its one
satellite. You've heard of the system, I'm sure; that's where we all came from. A few other things about it
are well known. Unless you're an anthropologist, though, I doubt you've ever been there. It's way the hell
off the main trading routes and pretty primitive. I was a drive-mechanics major, on scholarship, living in
and studying hard. All morning in Practical Theory (a ridiculous name for a ridiculous class, I thought
then) we'd been putting together a model keeler-intergalactic drive. Throughout those dozens of helical
inserts and super-inertia organus sensitives, I had been silently cursing my teacher, thinking, about like
everyone else in the class, "So what if they can fly these jalopies from one galaxy to another. Nobody will
ever be able to ride in them. Not with the Psychic and Physiologic shells hanging around this cluster of the
universe."

Back in the dormitory I was lying on my bed, scraping graphite lubricant from my nails with the end of my
slide rule and half reading at a folded-back copy of The Young Mechanic when I saw the article and the
pictures.

Through some freakish accident, two people had been discovered who didn't crack up at twenty
thousand light-years off the galactic rim, who didn't die at twenty-five thousand.

They were both psychological freaks with some incredible hormone imbalance in their systems. One was
a little Oriental girl; the other was an older man, blond and big-boned, from a cold planet circling
Cygnus-beta: golden. They looked sullen as hell, both of them.

Then there were more articles, more pictures, in the economic journals, the sociology student-letters, the
legal bulletins, as various fields began acknowledging the impact that the golden and the sudden birth of
intergalactic trade were having on them. The head of some commission summed it up with the statement:
"Though interstellar travel has been with us for three centuries, intergalactic trade has been an
impossibility, not because of mechanical limitations, but rather because of barriers that till now we have
not even been able to define. Some psychic shock causes insanity in any humanтАФ or for that matter, any
intelligent species or perceptual machine or computerтАФthat goes more than twenty thousand light-years
from the galactic rim; then complete physiological death, as well as recording breakdown in computers
that might replace human crews. Complex explanations have been offered, none completely satisfactory,