"Norman Spinrad - Bug Jack Barron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

NORMAN SPINRAD


Bug Jack Barron

Dedicated, in gratitude, to
Michael Moorcock
and to the Milford Mafia




1
'Split boys, will you?' drawled Lukas Greene, waving his black hand (and
for that nasty little moment, for some reason, thinking of it as black) at
the two men (perversely seeing them for the tired moment as niggers) in
the Mississippi State Police (coon to the right) and Mississippi National
Guard (schvug to the left) uniforms.
'Yessur, Governor Greene,' the two men said in unison. (And Greene's
ear, caught in what he could outside viewpoint see as the dumb mindless
masochistic moment, heard it as 'Yassah Massah.')
'Tote dat barge,' Governor Greene said to the door when it had closed
behind them. What the hell's wrong with me today, Greene thought
irritably. That damned Shabazz. That dumb trouble-making nig —
There was that word again, and that was where the whole thing was at.
Malcolm Shabazz, Prophet of the United Black Muslim Movement,
Chairman of the National Council of Black Nationalist Leaders, Recipient
of the Mao Peace Prize, and Kingfish of the Mystic Knights of the Sea was
neither more nor less than a nigger. He was everything the shades saw
when they heard the word nigger: Peking-loving ignorant dick-dragging
black-oozing ape-like savage. And that cunning son of a bitch Malcolm
knew it and played on it, making himself a focus of mad white hate, the
purposeful prime target of a garbage-throwing screaming Wallacite
loonies, feeding on the hate, growing on it, absorbing it, saying to the
shades, 'I'm a big black mother, and I hate your fucking guts, and China is
the Future, and my dick is bigger than yours, and China is the Future, and
my twenty million bucks like me in this country, a billion in People's China
and four billion in the world who hate you like I hate you, die you shade
mother!'
As the Bohemian Boil-Sucker observed to the chick who farted in his
face. Greene thought, it's people like you, Malcolm, who make this job
disgusting.
Greene swiveled in his chair, and stared at the little TV perched on the
desk across from the in-out basket. Instinctively he reached for the pack of
Acapulco Golds sitting on the pristine desk top, then thought better of it.
Much as he needed a good lungful of pot at this moment on this day, it
was not a smart move for anyone who was where anything was at to be
under the influence of anything on a Wednesday night. He glanced
surreptitiously at the dead screen of his vidphone. The screen might very
well come alive during the next hour with the sardonically smiling face of