"Cordwainer Smith - Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Cordwainer)

The bulj-man was upon us.
At the last moment he swerved, passed us blindly, and let out a roar which filled the enormous passage. He had raced beyond us.
Still holding Virginia, I turned around to see what had made him pass us.
What I beheld was odd in the extreme.
Our figures ran down the corridor away from us-my black-purple cloak flying in the still air as my image ran, Virginia's golden dress swimming out behind her as she ran with me. The images were perfect and the bull-man pursued them.
I stared around in bewilderment. We had been told that the safeguards no longer protected us.
A girl stood quietly next to the wall. I had almost mistaken her for a statue. Then she spoke,
"Come no closer. I am a cat. It was easy enough to fool him. You had better get back to the surface."
'Thank you," I said, "thank you. What is your name?"
"Does it matter?" said the girl. "I'm not a person."
A little offended, I insisted, "I just wanted to thank you." As I spoke to her I saw that she was as beautiful and as bright as a flame. Her skin was clear, the color of cream, and her hair-finer than any human hair could possibly be-was the wild golden orange of a Persian cat.
"I'm C'mell," said the girl, "and I work at Earthport."
That stopped both Virginia and me. Cat-people were below us, and should be shunned, but Earthport was above us, and had to be respected. Which was C'mell?
She smiled, and her smile was better suited for my eyes than for Vir-
ginia's. It spoke a whole world of voluptuous knowledge. I knew she wasn't trying to do anything to me; the rest of her manner showed that. Perhaps it Was the only smile she knew.
"Don't worry," she said, "about the formalities. You'd better take these steps here. I hear him coming back."
I spun around, looking for the drunken bull-man. He was not to be seen.
"Go up here," urged C'mell. "They are emergency steps and you will be back on the surface. I can keep him from following. Was that French you were speaking?"
"Yes," said I. "How did you-?"
"Get along," she said. "Sorry I asked. Hurry!"
I entered the small door. A spiral staircase went to the surface. It was below our dignity as true people to use steps, but with C'mell urging me, there was nothing else I could do. I nodded goodbye to C'mell and drew Virginia after me up the stairs.
At the surface we stopped.
Virginia gasped, "Wasn't it horrible?"
"We're safe now," said I.
"It's not safety," she said. "It's the dirtiness of it. Imagine having to talk to her!"
Virginia meant that C'mell was worse than the drunken bull-man. She sensed my reserve because she said,
"The sad thing is, you'll see her again . . ."
"What! How do you know that?"
"I don't know it," said Virginia. "I guess it. But I guess good, very good. After all, I went to the Abba-dingo."
"I asked you, darling, to tell me what happened there."
She shook her head mutely and began walking down the streetway. I had no choice but to follow her. It made me a little irritable.
I asked again, more crossly, "What was it like?"
With hurt girlish dignity she said, "Nothing, nothing. It was a long climb. The old woman made me go with her. It turned out that the machine was not talking that day, anyhow, so we got permission to drop down a shaft and to come back on the rolling road. It was just a wasted day."
She had been talking straight ahead, not to me, as though the memory were a little ugly.
Then she turned her face to me. The brown eyes looked into my eyes
as though she were searching for my soul. (Soul. There's a word we have in French, and there is nothing quite like it in the Old Common Tongue.) She brightened and pleaded with me:
"Let's not be dull on the new day. Let's be good to the new us, Paul. Let's do something really French, if that's what we are to be."
"A cafe"," I cried. "We need a caf6. And I know where one is."
"Where?"
"Two undergrounds over. Where the machines come out and where they permit the homunculi to peer in the window." The thought of homunculi peering at us struck the new me as amusing, though the old me had taken them as much for granted as windows or tables. The old me never met any, but knew that they weren't exactly people, since they were, bred from animals, but they looked just about like people, and they could talk. It took a Frenchman like the new me to realize that they could be ugly, or beautiful, or picturesque. More than picturesque: romantic.
Evidently Virginia now thought .the same, for she said, "But they're nette, just adorable. What is the cafe" called?"
"The Greasy Cat," said I.
The Greasy Cat. How was I to know that this led to a nightmare between high waters, and to the winds which cried? How was I to suppose that this had anything to do with Alpha Ralpha Boulevard?
No force in the world could have taken me there, if I had known.
Other new-French people had gotten to the cafe" before us.
A waiter with a big brown moustache took our order. I looked closely at him to see if he might be a licensed homunculus, allowed to work among people because his services were indispensable; but he was not. He was pure machine, though his voice rang out with old-Parisian heartiness, and the designers had even built into him the nervous habit of mopping the back of his hand against his big moustache, and had fixed him so that little beads of sweat showed high up on his brow, just below the hairline.
"Mamselle? M'sieu? Beer? Coffee? Red wine next month. The sun will shine in the quarter after the hour and after the half-hour. At twenty minutes to the hour it will rain for five minutes so that you can enjoy these umbrellas. I am a native of Alsace. You may speak French or German to me."
"Anything," said Virginia. "You decide, Paul."
"Beer, please," said I. "Blonde beer for both of us."
"But certainly, M'sieu," said the waiter.