"Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

The Einstein Intersection
By Samuel R. Delany
Version 1.0

It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funanimal world. James Joyce/Finnegans
Wake

I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be
called madness.
Erasmus of Rotterdam /In Praise of Folly

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete.
When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade.
When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and
be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing
to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And
since I've been playing music I've been called all different kinds of
fool-more times than Lobey, which is my name.
What I look like?
Ugly and grinning most of the time. That's a whole lot of big nose and gray
eyes and wide mouth crammed on a small brown face proper for a fox. That, all
scratched around with spun brass for hair. I hack most of it off every two
months or so with my machete. Grows back fast. Which is odd, because I'm
twenty-three and no beard yet. I have a figure like a bowling pin, thighs,
calves, and feet of a man (gorilla?) twice my size (which is about five-nine)
and hips to match. There was a rash of hermaphrodites the year I was bom,
which doctors thought I might be. Somehow I doubt it.
Like I say, ugly. My feet have toes almost as long as my fingers and the big
ones are semi-opposable. But don't knock it; once I saved Little Jon's life.
We were climbing the Beryl Face, slipping around on all that glassy rock, when
Little Jon lost his footing and was dangling by one hand. I was hanging by my
hands, but I stuck my foot down, grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him back
up where he could step on something.
At this point Lo Hawk folds his arms over his leather shirt, nods sagely so
that his beard bobs on his ropy neck, says: "And just what were you two young
Lo men doing on Beryl Face in the first place? It's dangerous, and we avoid
danger, you know. The birthrate is going down, down all the time. We can't
afford to lose our productive youth in foolishness." Of course it isn't going
down. That's just Lo Hawk. What he means is that the number of total norms is
going down. But there's plenty of births. Lo Hawk is from the generation where
the number of non-functionals, idiots, mongoloids, and cretins was well over
fifty percent. (We hadn't adjusted to your images yet. Ah, well.) But now
there are noticeably more functional than non-functionals; so no great
concern.
Anyway, not only do I bite my fingernails disgracefully, I also bite my
toenails.
And at this point I recall sitting at the entrance of the source-cave where
the stream comes from the darkness and makes a sickle of light into the trees,
and a blood spider big as my fist suns himself on the rock beside me, belly
pulsing out from the sides of him, leaves flicking each other above. Then La