"Andre Norton - Cat's eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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Tikil was really three cities loosely bound together,
two properly recognized on the maps of Korwar's
northern continent, the third a soreтАФrather than a
scarтАФof war, still unhealed. To the north and west
Tikil was an exotic bloom on a planet that had harbored
wealth almost from the year of its first settlement. To
the east, fronting on the spaceport, was the part of
Tikil in which lay the warehouses, shops, and estab-
lishments of the thousands of businesses necessary for
the smooth running of a pleasure city, this exotic
bloom where three-quarters of the elite of a galactic
sector gathered to indulge their whims and play.

To the south was the Dipple, a collection of utili-
tarian, stark, unattractive housing. To live there was
a badge of inferiority. A man from the Dipple had
three choices for a cloudy future. He could try to exist
without subcitizenship and a work permit, haunting
the Casual Labor Center to compete with too many of
his fellows for the very limited crumbs of employment;

he could somehow raise the stiff entrance fee and buy
his way into the strictly illegal but flourishing and
perilous Thieves' Guild; or he could sign on as contract
labor and be shipped off world in deep freeze with no
beforehand knowledge of his destination or work.

The War of the Two Sectors had been fought to a
5

stalemate five years ago. Afterwards, the two leading
powers had shared out the spoilsтАФ"spheres of influ-
ence." Several major and once richer planets had to be
written off entirely, since worlds reduced to cinders on
which no human being dared land were not attractive
property. But a fringe of frontier worlds had passed
into the grasp of one or the other of the major
powersтАФthe Confederation or the Council. As a result,
the citizens of several small nations suddenly found

themselves homeless.
At the outbreak of the war ten years earlier, there

had been forced evacuations from such frontier worlds;

pioneers had been removed from their lands so that
military outposts and masked solar batteries could be
placed in their stead. In this fashion, the Dipple had