"Paul J. McAuley - Rocket Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

ROCKET BOY
Paul J. McAuley

Rocket Boy lived under the knot of ferroconcrete ribbons where the road from the
spaceport joined the beltway that girdled the city. HeтАЩd made a kind of nest in a high
ledge beneath the slope of an on-ramp, and although traffic rumbled overhead day
and night, it was as cozy and safe as anywhere on the street because it could be
reached only by squeezing through a kind of picket fence of squat, close-set
columns. Even so, Rocket Boy clutched a knife improvised from the neck of a
broken bottle while he slept in his nest of packing excelsior, charity blankets and
cardboard. The first lesson heтАЩd learned on the street was that you needed to carry a
weapon with you at all times.

The ledge was divided into two by expansion rollers at the joint between ramp
and road. The old man who lived on the other side of them had been a senior civil
servant before the war. HeтАЩd been arrested and tortured after the enemy had taken
the city, serving two years in solitary confinement before being released and
discovering that his family had been killed when a rogue cruise missile had levelled
their neighborhood. He and Rocket Boy had quickly come to an accommodation.
The old man guarded Rocket Boys nest while he was out on the street selling
cigarettes; Rocket Boy brought the old man hot dogs and soup from the charity
workers who visited the intersection every night, distributing free food and blankets
to the people who lived there.

More than two hundred people lived amongst the support columns and steep
concrete slopes under the intersection, in old cars, cardboard boxes, and crude huts
built from dead shopping carts and pallets and sheets of plastic tied down with twine
and electrical wire. Some were refugees and war orphans like Rocket Boy; some
were the cityтАЩs orphans, hard-eyed, feral runaways; some were men and women
turned old before their time by drink, drugs, and madness. There was a little flock of
shopping carts and other small mechs too, on the run from the wrecking gangs that
roved the bombed-out industrial sector to the west. They stood all day in sunlight,
trying to recharge their rotting batteries, and at night rolled about trying to be helpful
and mostly getting in the way, like sick pets no one had the heart to put down.

The perimeter of the spaceport was only a mile away from the intersection.
Once or twice a week, a heavy lifter took off from one of the massive blast pits,
shaking the ground and splitting the sky with a long peal of thunder. The crazy
people ran about beating their heads and tearing at their clothes, and the carts and
mechs were disturbed too, racing about in circles like bugs suddenly exposed to
light. At night, Rocket Boy liked to sit on an embankment that overlooked the
spaceport, watching ordinary jets and ground-to-orbit shuttles glide through the
white columns of searchlights towards runways outlined by mile-long traceries of red
and green lights.

Occasionally, there was a night launch, the spacecraft small and sharp in
crossing beams as it brewed clouds of steam and clouds of fire, rising achingly
slowly at first, and then accelerating away in a rising curve, a spear of flame
dwindling into the starry sky. Rocket Boy watched it go with a raw longing that
ached like a fresh wound, the earth beneath him throbbing with the thunder of its