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

"Oh," I said. "And what was Kyber?"

"It was a weapon, a sort of fungus the golden brought back from some overrun planet on the rim of
Andromeda. It's deadly. Only they were too stupid to bring back the antitoxin."

"That's golden for you."

"Yeah. You ever notice about golden, Vyme? I mean just the word. I found out all about it from my
publisher, once. It's semantically unsettling."

"Really?" I said. "So are they. Unsettling I mean." I'd just finished a rough, rough day installing a rebuilt
keeler in a quantum transport hull that just wasn't big enough. The golden having the job done stood over
my shoulder the whole time, and every hour he'd come out with the sort of added instruction that would
make the next sixty-one minutes miserable. But I did it. The golden paid me in cash and without a word
climbed into the lift, and two minutes later, while I was still washing the grease off, the damn
five-hundred-ton hulk began to whistle for takeoff. Sandy, a young fellow who'd come looking for a
temporary mechanic's job three months back, but hadn't given me cause to fire him yet, barely had time
to pull the big waldoes out of the way and go scooting into the shock chamber when the
three-hundred-meter doofus tore loose from the grapplers. And Sandy, who, like a lot of these
youngsters drifting around from job to job, is usually sort of quiet and vague, got loud and specific. ". . .
two thousand pounds of non-shockproof equipment out there . . . ruin it all if he could . . . I'm not
expendable, I don't care what a ... these golden out here . . ." while the ship hove off where only the
golden go. I just flipped on the "not-open" sign, left the rest of the grease where it was, left the hangar,
and hunted up Ratlit.

So there we were, under that street lamp, sitting on the Edge, in the world-wind.

"Golden," Ratlit said under the roar. "It would be much easier to take if it were grammatically connected
to something: golden ones, golden people. Or even one gold, two golden."

"Male golden, female goldene?"

"Something like that. It's not an adjective, it's not a noun. My publisher told me that for a while it was
written with a dash after it that stood for whatever it might modify."

I remembered the dash. It was an uneasy joke, a fill-in for that cough. Golden what? People had already
started to feel uncomfortable. Then it went past joking and back to just "golden."

"Think about that, Vyme. Just golden: one, two, or three of them."

"That's something to think about, kid-boy," I said.

Ratlit had been six during the Kyber war. Square that and add it once again for my age now. Ratlit's?
Double six and add one. I like kids, and they like me. But that may be because my childhood left me a lot
younger at forty-two than I should be. Ratlit's had left him a lot older than any thirteen-year-old has a
right to be.

"No golden took part in the war," Ratlit said.

"They never do." I watched his thin fingers get all tangled together.