"Joan D. Vinge - Psiren" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

Oldcity was the core, the heart of the new city called Quarro, the largest city
on the world Ardattee. Every combine holding on Ardattee had grown fat when the
Crab Nebula opened up and made it the gateway to the Colonies. Then the
Federation Transport Authority moved its information stor-age here and picked
Quarro to set it down in, and Quarro became the largest cityport on the planet by a
hundred times. Earth atrophied, and Ardattee became the trade center of the Human
Federation, the economic center, the cultural center. And somewhere along the way
someone had decided that the old, tired colonial town was historic, and ought to be
preserved.

But Quarro was built on a thumb-shaped peninsula between a harbor and the
sea; there was only so much land, and the new city kept growing, feeding on open
space, always need-ing moreтАФuntil it began to eat up the space above the old city,
burying it alive in a tomb of progress. The grumbling, dripping, tangled guts of
someone elseтАЩs palaces in the air shut Oldcity off from the sky, and no one lived
there any more who had any choice. Only the dregs, the losers and the users. It was
a place where the ones who wouldnтАЩt be caught dead living there came to feed off
the ones who couldnтАЩt escape.

I walked with Jule through the wormhole streets that tendriled in toward
Godshouse Circle, the one place in Oldcity where you could still see the sky. For
years IтАЩd thought the sky was solid, like a lid, and at night they turned the sun off. I
didnтАЩt mention it, as we pushed our way through the CircleтАЩs evening crowds of
beggars and jugglers and staggering burnouts. But I looked up at the sky, a deep,
unreachable indigo; down again at the golden people slumming and the hungry
shadows drifting beside them, behind them, a hand quicker than the eye in and out of
a pocket, a pouch, a fold. I felt my own fingers flexing, and my heartbeat
quickening.

I pushed my hands into my jacket pockets, made fists of them. Once a
Cityboy, always a CityboyтАжI felt OldcityтАЩs heavy rhythms stir my blood, make dark
magic in my head; my body filling with the hunger of it. Hot with life, cold as death,
raw like a wound, it left its scars on your flesh and its brand on your soul. A
hollow-eyed dealer was sliding be-tween us, selling the kind of dreams that donтАЩt
come true in a voice like iron grating on cement. It still shows. They can smell me. I
shoved him away, remembering too many times when it had gone the other way.

I turned off of the Circle into another street, not saying anything; my face stiff,
my mind clenched, hardly aware of Jule beside me. The dark, decaying building
fronts faded behind walls of illusion: Showers of gold that melted through your
hands, blizzards of pleasure and sudden prickles of pain, fluorescent holo-flesh
blossoming like the flowers of some alien jungle. The heart of the night burst open
here in sound that took your sight away, hard and blistering, sensual and yielding,
shimmering, pitiless. You could drown in your wildest fantasies right there in the
street, and I heard Jule crying out in wonder, joy, disgust, not knowing her own
emotions from everyone elseтАЩs.

But it was all a lie, and IтАЩd lived it too many times, hungry and cold and broke;
seen the ones who went through the images, through the doors where the fantasy
turned real, and left me standing thereтАФall beauty, all pleasure, all satisfac-tion