"Cory Doctorow - The Super Man and Bugout" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

The Belquees had the best Ethiopian food and the worst Ethiopian decor in town.
Successive generations of managers had added their own touches -- tiki-lanterns,
textured wallpaper, framed photos of Haile Selassie, tribal spears and grass
dolls -- and they'd accreted in layers, until the net effect was of an African
rummage sale. But man, the food was good.

Downstairs was a banquet room whose decor consisted of material too ugly to be
shown upstairs, with a stage and a disco ball. It had been a regular meeting
place for Toronto's radicals for more than fifty years, the chairs worn smooth
by generations of left-wing buttocks.

Tonight, it was packed. At least fifty people were crammed around the tables,
tearing off hunks of tangy rice-pancake and scooping up vegetarian curry with
them. Even before he saw Thomas, his super-hearing had already picked his voice
out of the din and located it. Hershie made a beeline for Thomas's table, not
making eye-contact with the others -- old-guard activists who still saw him as a
tool of the war-machine.

Thomas licked his fingers clean and shook his hand. "Supe! Glad you could make
it! Sit, sit." There was a general shuffling of coats and chairs as the other
people at the table cleared a space for him. Thomas was already pouring him a
beer out of one of the pitchers on the table.

"Geez, how many people did you invite?"

Tina, a tiny Chinese woman who could rhyme "Hey hey, ho ho" and "One, two,
three, four" with amazing facility said, "Everyone's here. The Quakers, the
commies, a couple of councilors, the vets, anyone we could think of. This is
gonna be _huge_."

The food hot, and the different curries and salads were a symphony of flavours
and textures. "This is terrific," he said.

"Best Ethiopian outside of Addis Ababa," said Thomas.

_Better than Addis Ababa_, Hershie thought, but didn't say it. He'd been in
Addis Ababa as the secret weapon behind Canada's third and most ill-fated
peacekeeping mission there. There hadn't been a lot of restaurants open then,
just block after block of bombed-out buildings, and tribal warlords driving
around in tacticals, firing randomly at anything that moved. The ground CO sent
him off to scatter bands of marauders while the bullets spanged off his chest.
He'd never understood the tactical significance of those actions -- still didn't


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-- but at the time, he'd been willing to trust those in authority.