"M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

Spaceport hustlers and buskers worked the streets all the way from the port to
the service areas, their peculiar instruments glimmering in the green street
light They solicited him, but he ignored them. He had seen them before,
shivering with cold and with fear of the long, incomprehensible future in the
night winds of a hundred planets, waiting out their time in the bleak
hinterlands of a thousand ports. They would go home later to the same greasy
doorways and park benches and barren flops, or ride the pneumatique systems
until dawn: threadbare losers for whom he could find no compassion because
they so resembled himself. Their aimless, eccentric hearts, their odors of
loss, demanded a response he was not yet prepared to giveтАФbecause it would be
an admission of kinship.
This isn't to say they made him unhappyтАФor that he lacked charity; he was just
hollow, nothing had ever filled him up.
Since his demob from the Fleet, a year after all the hysteria of the Canes
Venatici incident had come to nothing but the same kind of worn diplomacy that
had begun it, he had worked all over the sky, traveling a slow Archimedean
spiral in three dimensions, tracking in from Venatici through the Crow and the
Heavy Stars. He had driven half-tracks on Gloam and Parrot, built roads on
Jacqueline Kennedy Terminal; he had sung revolutionary songs and pushed
meta-ampheta-mines to the all-night workers on MorpheusтАФnot because he was in
any way committed to the insurrection that finally blew the planet apart, but
because he was stuck there and broke. After five years, he had ended up on
Earth, where everybody ends, guarding heavy plant machinery for the Israeli
World Government.
There he was paid handsomely for every Arab he shot, but not enoughтАФnot enough
for dirty work. He had found himself wetting his trousers every time
The Centaur; Device 3
somebody fired a gun (in fact, that had worn off after a time, but he still
told it that way, against himself with a lot of gestures and funny
voicesтАФespecially to port ladies), and tapping a streak of savagery he hadn't
suspected in himself. He found no sense of purpose in that stupid half-war,
either. Finally, it was too terrifying to find himself going through the
psychological maneuvers necessary to continue without the accompanying
commitment. He .left it alone, but in his customary indecisive manner. He
drifted away.
Had he not saved his bounty money and bought with it My Ella Speed (then
called Liberal Power, something which caused him to scratch his head), his
seven-year trip from demob day to Sad al Bari IV might easily have ended at
the periphery of the portтАФ accomplished by means of his horny thumb, a cheap
musical instrument, and his hat in the gutter the wrong way up to receive
bread. Instead of on his head where it belonged.
Even the purchase of the boat had, at the time, assumed the air of a fortunate
accident. Unused to ethanolтАФstill the sole legal euphoric of EarthтАФhe had
stumbled, smashed out of his head and laughing, into a breaker's yard
somewhere in the temperate zones; then passed out cold when he realized what
he'd spent his money on. John Truck was a loser, and losers, despite the
evidence to the contrary, survive on luck. Not that he'd considered it luck
then, lying on his back with the rusty, twisted towers of wrecks spinning
through his brain (and thinking, Oh God, what am I going to do with it?).
It was his personal disaster that he never learned to resist the flow of