"Grant, Charles L - Glow of Candles, a Unicorn's Eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Charles L)

"Oh? What for?"
"Well, really, Gordon, you holo folk stick together like I don't know what. I thought you might like to put out the word to your friends, have them watch their backs. So to speak."
I kept my hands in my pockets-clenched, to keep them from trembling. I nodded, hoping to appear contrite and grateful simultaneously, and led him toward the door.
"The favor?"
"What favor?" I said. "Oh. Well, sure. What is it?"
He took my arm at the elbow, his fat hand tight, the fingers pinching. "Please, talk to Vivian, won't you? I can't stand having to beg for a meal every day. I mean-really, Gordon, it's so demeaning, if you know what I mean."
"Philip, Vivian could get you a dozen parts tomorrow if you would only let her. But you won't. And until you do, there's nothing I can do, either."
He stepped back as if I had slapped him. Then, a scowl as dark as midnight crowding his face, he shouldered by me into the corridor outside the loft. He took a step toward the liftube, looked back over his shoulder, and smiled.
"You'd force me to do that, wouldn't you?"
"Phil, I'm not forcing you to do a thing. You want me to ask Vivian to let you back, you'll have to compromise. That, my friend, is all there is to it."
"I'm sorry for you, then," he said, and left.
I waited for him to make a reappearance-waited, then hurried back into the loft and made a careful search to see if he had taken anything, disturbed anything. The only evidence he'd been there, however, was the pamph. It had been picked up from my couch, obviously read, and tossed onto the floor. I retrieved it, folded it into quarters, and stuffed it
into my pocket. It had on it the date Vivian had gotten me, the tickets, and the man I was to see to pick them up.
I felt sorry for Philip and his nonsense ways, but had more important things to worry about at the time. I ate rapidly, watched the news for indications of impending arrests, then called Helena and we spent the rest of the night tying up the vione, reading random scenes from the scripts she had lent me. I would read a line and try to stump her for the next. I , seldom won, but what was more important: I was learning
them myself, and moving about the room grandly, until she snapped once that I kept disappearing from the vione's range.
It was, without a doubt or a worry, the single best way to pass the time-short of actually having her in my arms, of course.
That, I promised her a dozen times during the night, would come later. And often.
And all the time, that hovering I had felt drew more steady, closer, and the answering light more clear.

At last, a week later, I stood in front of the theater in the park. It was a low dome, black and silver and sprouting several cowl-like entrances through which people were already filing. A mosaic apron in blue, gold, and white led up to the dome, and from its center rose a tall post with four huge spotlights. Their soft glare was somewhat reassuring, but it turned the surrounding foliage into a dense black wall.
"Gordon!"
My name was like a slap across the back of my head. I stiffened, not knowing whether to run or surrender, then turned. It was Helena who stepped out of the shadows. Lithe, she looked uncommonly lovely in a plain gray tunic and trousers. Her auburn hair was almost like a veil. I held out my hands and she grasped them, pulled me close, and we kissed, once, lightly, forever.
Then I told her about Philip's visit, and she shattered her loveliness with a vicious scowl. "Relax," I said, rubbing at her arm. "The most he can do is swear a lot."
The floodlights dimmed twice.
"Time, great hunter," she said. "No more stalling."

There were dozens of gold guidelights hovering at the head of each aisle. I held up my tickets and one of them brightened .and led us to our seats, seats in an auditorium that radiated back from a traditional stage. I mentally blessed poor Vivian's efforts, crossed my legs, and held Helena's hand. Waiting. Staring at the proscenium, which was studded with holovid representations of the solar system, each planet revolving in truncated orbit, the moon in its center, dotted with blue specks that marked the colonists' domes. I was

impressed, and depressed. I was cold, unusually so, and I could not figure out just why this was so.
I tried concentrating on the curtains, on the flecks of,' crimson that flashed whenever a guidelight flitted too close:;
I tried listening to the audience around me, its muffled; laughter, gossip, scoldings, coughing.
Something.
Something. v
I knew it was there, but when I tried to drive it away so l~ could enjoy the show, it balked as if yanking on my arm to j tell me something far more important.
Music, then, and I was distracted.

And three quarters of the way through the first act, it all ~fell into place, solidly, painfully, so that with some mum
bled :I
. excuse to Helena, I crept up the aisle and hurried:: outside.
Walked. Paced, rather, in a large circle around the lightpost. i There was no doubt that the performance was something I would never forget-if novelties are things from which memories are spun. The company was expert, the same I had seen a
'those long months ago, and this particular oarkdome had a been reconstructed to approximate and give semblance to the absence of gravity the players' were accustomed to on -their own home satellite.
It was, in one dark sense, beautiful.
On the stage they were in all manner of costume. Free. Floating. Swimming. A free-form exercise complete with sets and speeches. The women were pale snowflakes drifting around men who were the same. I hadn't been able to follow. the story very well-something about a starship lost around ' Andromeda-but many times there were long pauses in the action and in the flow of words, and the children in the audience grew restless and whispered. As did the adults by the time I had left. I could see, then, that before it was done, few would be listening to the dialogue magnified and booming. They would be watching only--and for that they all could _j have just as easily attended a joyhall show.
The play was a circus. ui
The Lunars were freaks. i
That was why the people came. And that, I finally understood, was why they went to other plays, in theaters, on _, stages. I was a freak. A freak who happened to be around
when volcanoes erupted or a ceilingstorm thundered or the sets changed so rapidly it gave one a headache. There was no longer any discipline, either in players or audience, no feel for words, because the words were instantaneous.
It was stupid. I should have seen it before. It was obvious, so obvious that I had overlooked it in search of something far more complicated, far less damning.
What did the man say? The man who broke the unicom of my dreams and who tries now to blow out my candles? A world something by lightning. Well, I was struck.
And I was . . . I was mad.