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

spacers, who, like John Truck, understood that music had died out in the year
2,000 and that the New Music was the old music. Only the winners escape, Truck
thought as the old Strat wailed (taking fours with a wholly imaginary wind
which nevertheless sent tremors of intent down the backs of his calves and
thighs: the port wind, the compass wind). The rest of us get carried by the
music. Why not?
There was only one woman m the Spacer's Rave that night. Her name was Angina
Seng, and she was looking for John Truck. He wasn't to know it: he could only
see her back. Her hah- was long and coppery, she held herself with a certain
dramatic tension. Her bottom looked nice. So while Tiny Skeffern screwed it
out of his glossy, priceless antique for the disconnected, the discontented
and the rudderless of the whole duty universe, John Truck fell precipitately
6 t The Centaur/ Device
in and out of love with her. It was an impartial, on-off passion, for every
spaceport lady seen fleetingly in a crowd. He was prone to that sort of thing.
In a hiatus between sets, Tiny brought the Fender over.
"Hello, Truck."
He bobbed about for a moment, grinning sentimentally; sat down. Truck looked
with affection at his bald spot, beaded with sweat.
"Tiny, you play worse and worse. Who's the girl?"
Tiny huffed, wiped his sleeve over the guitar's immaculate white polymer
finish. He shrugged. Even when the Strat wasn't plugged in, the stubby,
clubbed fingers of his left hand ran up and down the frets like small,
undeveloped animals looking for a way out of the wind.
"Oh, thanks. She's not regular. Can you believe it, I've been here three
bloody weeks."
He rubbed his nose.
'Three weeks. Can you imagine that?**
He helped himself to some of Truck's unfinished treat.
"I don't understand how I can have done it. Outside being arrested, which I
wasn't. I've been careful since I had that finger broken on Barfield Eight.
Three weeks in this dump!"
"If you want to lift out of here," offered Truck.
"You've still got Ella Speed. What a name. I never could get over that."
He chuckled. *
Tfl be around when you finish this gig," Truck told him. "Or you could find
her at the dock. I had her painted up about a year ago. Fix the bosun is
aboard, I hope."
Tiny got up. He did a little energetic shuffle, nodded, and went back to his
band. He and Truck hadn't met much since his teen-age prodigy days, when he'd
been playing the circuits on Gloam. Between riots, that had been a lot of
laughs, Truck recollected. He smiled to
Trie Centaur? Device 7
himself and worked some THC grit from between two of his teeth with his
tongue. And he laughed out loud when Tiny leaned down from the poky Rave stage
and whispered something to the girl with the coppery hair.
He didn't understand how she could be so pleased to see him. How could he? He
only knew that spaceport women sometimes have metaphysical hungers hard to
describe riding tandem with then- more common appetites. They represent a
different function of space, a significance of loneliness lost on their male