"Michael Swanwick - Walking Out" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

they'd be in serious trouble.
The peoplemover "Spirit of Leningrad" pulled in. Seats filled up fast,
and there were six or seven people left standing when it left the station. A
teenager in an orange leather jacket studded with video pins sat down
next to Terry, then offered his chair to an old woman. A dozen pop songs
clashed faintly from his pins. The crone smiled at him, sat down, adjusted
her seat.
"I'm moving to New England," Terry told her. "Maybe this month."
She glared at him and turned her chair away.
City dwellers were rude. Terry was used to it. He sighed, and flicked on
his paper.
HOUSING SHORTAGE SHAKES CITY, said the Times. Just another
reason to get out. WORST SITUATION SINCE WAR. There were people, it
seemed, who'd been waiting weeks for a suitable upgrade. Of course the
Times was an opposition paperтАФit had to put a bad face on everything.
JOBLESS RATE HITS 35%, said the News. The News was an
establishment rag; somewhere in the article would be statistics justifying
the situation. But the way Terry saw it the figures spoke for themselves.
With a third of the working population on sabbatical at any given time,
that meant almost three percent were between jobs, pounding the
pavement, making do with three-quarters normal salary and benefits.
Times were tough.
Terry hit Midtown before the Authority office opened, so he stopped in
a diner for brunch. It was a Polynesian joint with thatched roofs over the
tables and white sand covering the floor. He ordered the
papaya-breadfruit surprise and two eggs that had never been inside a
chicken. He didn't bother with the orange juice. It never tasted like the
stuff he used to drink when he was a kid. The way he figured it, if they
didn't have it down by now, they never would. You simply couldn't get
oranges like they had back then anymore.
He picked at his food, thinking about Krissie. Pregnancy was tough.
Kris had less than a year's leave for it. And the neighborhood maternity
centerтАФwell, he guessed it was okay. Just last night the nurse-midwife had
come by for the weekly and she'd said Krissie was doing fine. Still, you
couldn't help but worry.
What kind of a place was this to bring up a kid in, anyway? Children
needed to run wild, enough room so they could stretch out and grow,
woods they could disappear into for hours and days at a time.
 "A penny for your thoughts," the waitress said when she brought the bill
and thumbpad.
Terry waved a hand toward the dugout canoe that hung from the rafters
in the back of the diner over a small turquoise waterfall. "That thing's
Malaysian, you know that? This whole place is about as Polynesian as I
am. I mean, you can talk about cultural preservation all you want, but let's
be honest here. It's pointless to pretend you can preserve a culture you've
never experienced first-hand. You wind up with the MGM-Disney fantasy
version of something that never existed in the first place. You get where
I'm coming from?"
He jabbed his thumb on the pad and left without even picking up his
complimentary breath mint.