"Stephen Goldin - Scavenger Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

beside the doorway, looking down on the proceedings in the immense hall.
The floor plan of Hunt Hall was rectangular, five hundred meters by three
hundred, but the walls curved up elliptically to make the hall seem more
like the interior of a giant egg. There were close to a thousand people
down there on the floor, but they were still lost in the enormity of the hall
itself. Crowding would have been too déclassé for words.

She stood for a long moment eyeing the scene proudly, like a monarch
surveying her domain. Then she walked in long, catlike strides to the
entrance of the transparent gravtube, letting the gravitic field within it
take over and float her gently down to the floor of the hall. She could have
been posing for a marble statue; all the way down, her gaze remained level
and her expression never altered. There was only the slightest of bumps to
inform her that she had reached the floor level. She stepped out of the
tube and began to mingle with the rest of the company.

Tyla seemed to move at random through the crowd, but her course of
movement was never purposeless. Her sharp mind was working like an
efficient file-card index as she wandered through small knots of people.
Like:

Kontorr, Occla: casual acquaintance—cordial nod, word of greeting; or
 alMassan, Ranso: old family friend—warm smile, exchange of
pleasantries; or

Tens, Arrira: not speaking to her this month—frown of cool disdain; or

Corbright, Wilferrv never formally introduced—polite diffidence; or

Danovich, Necor: former lover, about two years back—friendly smile,
stop for small talk.

There were a great many entries like that last, for Tyla deVrie had cut a
very wide swath through the eligible young men of Society circles. The
pattern was always the same—she would take a lover for a short time, then
drop him suddenly without reason. Her perpetual switching of partners
created a source of gossip among the ladies of lesser stature, of frustration
for the lovers she had abandoned and of hope for the men she had yet to
become involved with, each of whom dreamed that he might be the one to
finally tame her.

When she met one of her old lovers, she would never fail to ask whether
he was entered in the Hunt, and invariably the answer was, "Of course."

Although several young would-be suitors tried discreetly to attract her
attention, nobody volunteered to speak with her before she spoke to them.
Tyla wasn't fooled at all by the maintenance of social distance. These
people knew they were outclassed and respected the fact. Tyla knew she
would be in for an evening of sidelong glances—the women ogling her
dress and the men ogling what was under it. She didn't mind this