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

events; he never learned to ~make steerage way.
Proton Alley is as cold as all the other streets; any warmth you think you
might have found there always turns out to be an illusory side-product of the
color of the vapor signs. All its denizens have digested their experience of
life so well that nothing of it remains to
4 - The Centaur/ Device
them. They start fresh and naive every day, but still regard you with empty
eyes. No warmth; but John Truck basked in its familiarity, which is perhaps an
acceptable substitute on any evening dedicated to a saint Outside the Spacer's
Rave, an ancient fourth-generation Denebian with skin blackened and seamed,
and eyelids perpetually lowered against the actinic glare of a star he hadn't
seen for twenty years, was reciting lines from the second canto of The Fight
At Finnsburg. His hat was at his feet. His boots were cracked, but his voice
was passable, booming out over the heads of passing whores and stoned Fleet
men:
The Marty Lingham discovered a bleak orbit; hooked by a fuchsia dwarf,
perihelion at the customary handful of millions: cometary, cemetery.
He showed his nasty old teeth to Captain Truck, recognizing another loser,
however well disguised. He screwed up his dreadful face, winked.
"An intellectual, am I right, bosunтАФ?" he began his spiel, stepping craftily
into Truck's bee-line.
"If it hadn't been for that,** Truck swore later, "I might have given him
something."
Inside the Rave, it was a different matter: inside, Tiny Skeffern, the
Galaxy's last great musician, was blowing his brains out through his
instrument like the contents of a rare egg.
John Truck knew him of old. He stood five foot three and slightly built in the
Rave's confusion of spot┬з and strobes and kaleidomats, tapping his right foot.
IBs hah- was sparse, curly, and blondтАФat twenty-two years, he already had a
bald patch. When he wasn't playing, he was spring-heeled, he was a leaper;
when he was, he stayed in one place for minutes on end, giving the ladies a
reserved but cheeky smile. He was an enthusiastic loser from way back, and he
nodded when Truck came in.
The Centauri Device 5
He played a four-hundred-year-old Fender Strato-caster with all the switchgear
jammed full on, through a stack of Luthos ampsтАФeach one with a guaranteed
output of half a kilowattтАФand a battery of Hydrogen Line thirty-inch speakers.
He had a loose-limbed Denebian queen, all pink flares and slashed sleeves, oa
bass; his drummer was a local man, looking seedy and aggressive by turns like
all good drummers. His sound:
His sound was long-line and hairy, slow and grinding, full of inexplicable
little runs and complications. He stalked the Denebian bass through the
harmonies; he made sounds like breaking glass and exploding quasars, like dead
ships and orbital confrontations and eras of geological upheaval; he made
sounds like God.
Tin a highway chfld,** he sang, "so don't deny my name."
Which was all as it should be.
John Truck licked his lips and bought himself a knickerbocker glory topped
with little crystals of te-trahydrocannabinol; he had a look at the audience.
They were mostly musicians from other bands, but there was a sprinkling of