"Paul J. McAuley - Rocket Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

engines.

Rocket Boy was sixteen. When he’d first come to live under the intersection,
he’d called himself Vigo, the hero of a naive children’s book he’d read a couple of
years before the war, when he’d still been a kid, when he’d still had a family and a
future, but he’d soon discovered that on the street nothing, not even your name, is
your own. The young hoodlum in charge of the gang of streetsellers had started to
call him Rocket Boy because of his unnatural fascination with the spaceport, and
because that was the name of the brand of cigarettes he sold loose at the intersection
of Fourth Avenue and Industry Way, and the name had stuck. Rocket Boy worked
from dawn to dusk seven days a week, selling cigarettes to the men and women who
worked in the fabricants and warehouses. Time moved oddly on the street. Every
day seemed interminable, but because each was the same as the one before, weeks
and months slipped by like vehicles streaming along the freeway. In winter, dust
blew out of the north and shrouded the city in a yellow pall. In summer, flocks of
noctids swooped through the dusk air after insects, and the inhabitants of the little
shanty town under the intersection knocked them out of the air with sticks or crude
bolas made from stones and wire, and made a gummy soup by boiling up their
wings.

One summer night, in the middle of a long heat wave, Rocket Boy had given
up on sleep and was sitting high on an embankment, watching the lights of the
spaceport shimmer across kilometers of blast pits and landing strips and concrete
aprons, when a vehicle braked hard somewhere above him, a sliding screech, a blare
of horns. As Rocket Boy scrambled to his feet, a man vaulted the safety barrier and
slid down the dry bank, asking him if he know a place to hide. He was taller and
skinnier than anyone Rocket Boy had ever seen, with dark brown skin, and black
hair greased back from a hawkish profile. He wore heavy boots with steel buckles
and straps, filthy jeans, and a denim jacket with many zippers and fasteners. A small
leather duffel bag was slung over his back. There was a gold socket above one ear,
and his eyes were capped with data lenses that blankly reflected the last of the light
dying out of the sky as he looked up at the edge of the road above, head cocked. A
moment later, Rocket Boy heard the wail of sirens, and whirling blue lights swept
past on the beltway.

“Got into a little trouble,” the man said. “My mate will lead ‘em a good old
chase, but they’ll catch him soon enough, and he’ll have to tell ‘em where I jumped,
so I need a place to lay low. Just for a few hours, until the maintenance workers’
shift changes, and I can sneak into the port. Help me out, and I’ll give you your
heart’s desire.”

Rocket Boy knew that the man was trouble, but he also knew that the man
was one of the spacers who travelled amongst the worlds beyond, worlds full of
wonders beyond measure or understanding, where he so very badly longed to go,
and he led the man to the intersection, through the close-set maze of pillars, to his
nest. The man declared it an ideal bolt-hole, took a swig of whiskey from a flat
bottle, and promptly fell asleep. Rocket Boy, a hundred questions bubbling through
his head, sat in the dark, knee to knee with his strange guest, listening for police
sirens, and presently fell asleep too.