"Joan D. Vinge - Cat 1 - Psion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

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PART III
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 PART I CAT
The gem-colored dream shattered, and left the kid gaping on the street. Jarred by
passers-by and stunned by ugliness, he gulped humid night air. The dreamtime he had
paid his last marker for was over, and somewhere in the street voices sang, “Reality is no
one’s dream. . . .”
A richly robed customer of the Last Chance suicide gaming house knocked him
against a pitted wall, not even seeing him. He cursed wearily and fumbled his way to the
end of the building. Pressure-sensitive lighting flickered beneath the heavy translucent
pavement squares, trailing him as he stepped into the funnel of an alleyway. Aching with
more than one kind of hunger, he crept into the darkness to sleep it off.
And one of the three Contract Labor recruiters who had been watching nodded, and
said, “Now.”
The kid settled into a crevice between piles of cast-off boxes, where the unsleeping
gleam of the pavement was buried under layers of back-alley filth. He didn’t mind dirt;
he didn’t even notice it. Dirt grayed his worn clothes, the pale curls of his hair, the warm
brown of his skin. Dirt was a part of his life: like the smell, like the constant drip of
sewage somewhere in the darkness, leaking down through the roof of his world from
Quarro, the new city that had buried Oldcity alive.
Water striking a metal walkway rang like endless bells through the fibers of his abused
nerves. He raised unsteady hands to cover his ears, trying to stop the sound of the water
torture and the sounds of the furious argument in a room up over his head. He felt the
throbbing of distant music . . . the beat of heavy footsteps coming down the alley toward
him.
He froze, sitting as still as death, caught in a sudden premonition. His eyes came open
slowly, intensely green eyes with long slitted pupils like a cat’s. The pupils widened, his
eyes became pools of blackness absorbing every particle of available light-showing him
with unhuman clarity three heavy bodies wearing shadow-black uniforms: the carrion
crows of Contract Labor, a press gang searching the night for “volunteers.” Searching for
him.
“Jeezu!” His drug-heavy body jerked with panic. He dropped forward onto his knees,
hands groping in the trash around him. His fingers closed over the plass-smooth coolness
of a bottleneck. He pulled it to him as the alley filled with dazzling, confused motion and
he was surrounded by men in black. Their hands caught his clothing, dragging him up,
off-balance; he was slapped, shoved. Trying to find words, breath, time to protest . . . he
found his arm instead, his hand, the bottle clutched in it. He brought it up in one hard
sudden rush.
The heavy shatterproof plass struck the side of a man’s head with a dull sponk; the
impact jarred the kid against the greasy building wall, and the recruiter fell. Two were
still coming, their faces dark with vengeance, ready to make him pay. He dodged left,
right, making them counter; suddenly he kicked out and up with ruthless urgency. A
second man went to his knees with a bellow of agony.
The third one was on him as he tried to break away, dragging him back and down. The
kid clawed at the pile of crates beside him, twisting like a snake in the recruiter’s grip.
The load shifted and swayed; he felt it begin to fall-