"Ay, and Gomorra by Samuel Delany" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

with shrimp fishermen. But we yelled, broke another win-
dow; then while I was lying on my back on the telegraph
office steps, singing, a woman with dark lips bent over and
put her hands on my cheeks. "You are very sweet." Her
rough hair fell forward. "But the men, they are standing
around and watching you. And that is taking up time. Sadly,
their time is our money. Spacer, do you not think you . . .
people should leave?"
I grabbed her wrist. "fUstedl" I whispered. "jUsted es
una frelka?"
"Frelko in espanol." She smiled and patted the sunburst
that hung from my belt buckle. "Sorry. But you have nothing
that . . . would be useful to me. It is too bad, for you look
like you were once a woman, no? And I like women,
too...."
I rolled off the porch.
"Is this a drag, or is this a drag!" Muse was shouting.
"Come on! Let's go!"
We managed to get back to Houston before dawn, some-
how. And went up.
And came down in Istanbul:
That morning it rained in Istanbul.
At the commissary we drank our tea from pear-shaped
glasses, looking out across the Bosphorus. The Princes Islands
lay like trash heaps before the prickly city.
"Who knows their way in this town?" Kelly asked.
"Aren't we going around together?" Muse demanded. "I
thought we were going around together."
"They held up my check at the purser's office," Kelly
explained. "I'm flat broke. I think the purser's got it m for
me," and shrugged. "Don't want to, but I'm going to have to
hunt up a rich frelk and come on friendly," went back to the
tea; then noticed how heavy the silence had become. "Aw,
come on, now! You gape at me like that and I'll bust every
bone in that carefully-conditioned-from-puberty body of
yours. Hey you!" meaning me. "Don't give me that holier-
than-thou gawk like you never went with no frelk!"
It was starting.
"I'm not gawking," I said and got quietly mad.
The longing, the old longing.
Bo laughed to break tensions. "Say, last time I was in
Istanbulabout a year before I joined up with this platoon.
1 remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down
Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little
passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other
spacers. It's a market in there, and farther down they got
fish,, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea
urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front. Anyway, we no-
ticed something funny about the spacers. It wasn't their
uniforms: they were perfect. The haircuts: fine. It wasn't