"John Varley - Pusher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

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Pusher
John Varley

John Varley didn't send any biographical information with his manuscript; when I called him he
said he didn't believe in that sort of thing. Just make something up. Oh, the temptation. For the
sake of the publisher's legal department, though, I won't yield to it.
Varley is generally considered to have been one of the two or three most important writers
to emerge in the 1970s. His novella "The Persistence of Vision" won both Hugo and Nebula awards,
and provides the title for his collection of short stories. His latest novel, Demon, completes the
trilogy started with Titan and Wizard. He lives in a land where the river runs backwards and he is
named after an herb.

Things change. Ian Haise expected that. Yet there are certain constants, dictated by function and
use. Ian looked for those and he seldom went wrong.
The playground was not much like the ones he had known as a child. But playgrounds are
built to entertain children. They will always have something to swing on, something to slide down,
something to climb. This one had all those things, and more. Part of it was thickly wooded. There
was a swimming hole. The stationary apparatus was combined with dazzling light sculptures that
darted in and out of reality. There were animals too: pygmy rhinoceros and elegant gazelles no
taller than your knee. They seemed unnaturally gentle and unafraid.
But most of all, the playground had children.
Ian liked children.
He sat on a wooden park bench at the edge of the trees, in the shadows, and watched them.
They came in all colors and all sizes, in both sexes. There were black ones like animated licorice
jellybeans and white ones like bunny rabbits, and brown ones with curly hair and more brown ones
with slanted eyes and straight black hair and some who had been white but were now toasted browner
than some of the brown ones.
Ian concentrated on the girls. He had tried with boys before, long ago, but it had not
worked out.
He watched one black child for a time, trying to estimate her age. He thought it was
around eight or nine. Too young. Another one was more like thirteen, judging from her shirt. A
possibility, but he'd prefer something younger. Somebody less sophisticated, less suspicious.
Finally he found a girl he liked. She was brown, but with startling blond hair. Ten?
Possibly eleven. Young enough, at any rate.
He concentrated on her and did the strange thing he did when he had selected the right
one. He didn't know what it was, but it usually worked. Mostly it was just a matter of looking at
her, keeping his eyes fixed on her no matter where she went or what she did, not allowing himself
to be distracted by anything. And sure enough, in a few minutes she looked up, looked around, and
her eyes locked with his. She held his gaze for a moment, then went back to her play.
He relaxed. Possibly what he did was nothing at all. He had noticed, with adult women,
that if one really caught his eye so he found himself staring at her, she would usually look up
from what she was doing and catch him. It never seemed to fail. Talking to other men, he had found
it to be a common experience. It was almost as if they could feel his gaze. Women had told him it
was nonsense, or if not, it was just reaction to things seen peripherally by people trained to