"Norman Spinrad - Riding the Torch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

 Bandoora's thin lips parted in what might have been a smile, or just as
easily a grimace of pain. D'mahl sensed that the man's emotional
parameters were truly alien to his experience, prime or simmed. He had
never paid attention to the voidsuckers before, and he wondered why.
There was one beyond senso to be made on the subject!
"They've found a planet," Jiz said. "There's going to be a blanket
bulletin at 23.80."
"Drool," D'mahl said, nuancing the word with most of the feelings that
this flash stirred up. The voidsuckers were always reporting back with
some hot new solar system, turning the Trek for a few months while they
high-geed for a telltale peek, then turning the Trek again for the next
Ultima Thule just as the flash hit that the last one was the usual slokyard
of rock and puke-gas. The voidsuckers had been leading the Trek in a
zigzag stagger through space from one vain hope to another for the better
part of a millennium; the latest zig was therefore hardly a cosmic flash in
Jofe D'mahl's estimation. But it would be a three-month wonder at least,
and tapping out a blanket bulletin just before the premiere was a prime
piece of upstaging, a real boot in the ego. Drool.
"The probabilities look good on this one," Bandoora said.
"They always do, don't they?" D'mahl said snidely. "And it always turns
out the same. If there's a rock in the habitable zone, it's got gravity that'd
pull your head off, or the atmosphere is a tasty mixture of hydrogen
cyanide and fluorine. Bandoora, don't you ever get the feeling that some
nonexistent cosmic personage is trying to tell you something you don't
want to hear?"
Bandoora's inner expression seemed, to crinkle behind his impassive
flesh. A tic made his lower lip tremble. What did I do this time? D'mahl
wondered. These voidsuckers must be far beyond along some pretty
strange vectors.
Jiz forced a laugh. "The torch Jof is riding is all ego," she said. "He's
just singed because the bulletin is going to bleed some H from his
premiere. Isn't that right, Jof, you egomonster, you?"
"Don't knock ego," D'mahl said. "It's all that stands between us and the
lamer universe we have the bad taste to be stuck in. Since my opinion of
myself is the only thing I know of higher in the karmic pecking order than
my own magnificent being, my ego is the only thing I've found worth
worshiping. Know what that makes me?"
"Insufferable?" Jiz suggested.
 "A human being," D'mahl said. "I'm stuck with it, so I might as well
enjoy it."
"A bulletin from the Council of Pilots." The words intruded themselves
into D'mahl's mind with a reasonable degree of gentleness, an
improvement over the days when the Pilots had felt they had the right to
snap you into full sensory fugue on the spot whenever the spirit moved
them. "Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . ." D'mahl pulled over a green
fuzzball and anchored the floating cloud of particles by planting his
posterior in it. Jiz and Bandoora sat down flanking him. "Six . . . five . . .
four . . ."
Whichever guests were standing found themselves seats; there was no
telling how long one of these bulletins would last. The Pilots have a grossly