"Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 1 - Crescent in the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffitt Donald)

fellow moles from parallel lanes.
"Balak, balak, watch where you're going, fellow!" a voice shouted close behind him, and he jumped
aside to let a beeping scooter past. Its rider was a plump, complacent man in flowing robes, with baskets
piled up high behind himтАФa merchant lay-ing in stock to take advantage of the unexpected f├кte,
Hamid-Jones supposed. The man's robes brushed Hamid-Jones's leg as he squeezed past, and the scooter
continued threading its dig-nified way through the thickening traffic, its wheels masked by the merchant's
skirts, so that he seemed like a floating apparition in white.
The suq was already gay with colored streamers that the shop-keepers had draped from the upper
arcades, and Hamid-Jones could sense movement behind the lacy shutters where hidden eyes followed the
excitement down below. One of the shop-keepers saw him standing there and came out of his boxlike stall
to accost him.
"Ya sidi, don't you want to wear your finest for the holiday?" he said, staring accusingly at Hamid-Jones's
cheap plastic san-dals. "Yallah, let me show you a pair of shoes in real leather."
Hamid-Jones shook him off and continued. Other tradesmen clamored at him from their stalls, for the
most part automatically after assessing him as a poor prospect, and turned to importune the better-dressed
uptunnel slummers and unwary tourists from the starships docked at Phobos.
A man with alcohol on his breath bumped into him and reeled away after mumbling an apology. An early
celebrant with the bad judgment to be drunk in public. Hamid-Jones hurried to be out of the idiot's vicinity as
quickly as possible. It was best not to be around such people. Sooner or later they were picked up by the
religious police. Even the rug merchant toward whom the man now lurched was not eager to have anything
to do with him and melted into the depths of his cubicle.
Another twenty minutes' walking took Hamid-Jones to his own tunnel, the Street of the Well, with its cleft
ceiling and rough-hewn rear escarpment. The well was only a centuries-old memory, but the Emir's
pipelines brought untaxed water to the district, and even the meanest streets in the capital city were plugged
into the power grid.
He reached the blank stone face of his lodgings and rattled the gate until the porter came to let him in. "
Ya Ibrahim, you're getting slow," he said, smiling.
"People going in and out at any hour they choose," the old man grumbled. "What's the world coming to?"
He was a dour, creaking person with one milky eye where an autocloned re-placement, after some accident
in his youth, had failed to take. Hamid-Jones had often urged him to have it done over again and had even
offered to take him to the Palace employee clinic where he could help him finagle a discount, but the old
man would only sigh, "Inch'allah, it is the will of God." Hamid-Jones knew that he was afraid of the
procedure.
The gate swung shut behind them, and Ibrahim shuffled off to his cubbyhole in the wall where his equally
ancient wife no doubt was preparing his holiday supper.
Hamid-Jones skirted the rocky wall of the courtyard toward the back stairs that led to his own room,
hoping to avoid a protracted encounter with the small coterie of lodgers who liked to sit out here at this hour
for tea and interminable conversation. Mr. Faqoosh the mullah, in particular, liked to lecture him at length
about the wicked ways of today's youth.
But they saw him, and he was trapped. "Ya Abdul, come join us!" Mr. Najib called out genially. Mr. Najib
was the manager of a prayer-rug factory with a good source of income from rake-offs on government
contracts; a portly, self-important man who liked to lord it over the others.
"Bikul surur, with great pleasure," Hamid-Jones replied, and trudged resignedly across the yard to the
circle of old chairs and sofas that had been arranged cosily to make a sort of diwa-niyyahтАФan open-air
social hallтАФin the angle of the wall.
He sat down on one of the sprung couches next to Mr. Fahti, an inoffensive little man who was employed
as a farash, the person who made the coffee, in some government bureauтАФand saw too late that he had
placed himself opposite the mullah.
He looked around. It was a larger group than usual this eve-ning, when people would be dying to discuss
the meaning of today's surprising turn of events. Hamid-Jones saw Mr. Ka-reem, a desk clerk at the