"Lee Killough - Symphony for a Lost Traveler" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killough Lee)

for a break before looking for the strand sequences to harmonize with and make a counterpoint to the
main sequence.
***


Ashendene greeted her with a nod of approval. "Lovely."
Cimela smiled. Though this was just a break in work, she had dressed carefully, choosing a gauzy gold
jumpsuit with the voluminous sleeves and legs, snuggly cuffed at wrists and ankles, that the Moon's low
gravity inspired in this year's fashions. Sitting down at the round library-type table where dinner had been
set, she looked out at the crater and up to the luminous globe of Earth overhead. "Do you like this room
best for its view of Earth or the moon?"
"The stars." Ashendene said
The butler poured wine and served dinner, gliding over the glowing floor silent and efficient as a robot.
Her Kings of the Air played softly around them, a chorus of strings singing the nucleotide sequences of
the great raptors.
Ashendene asked, "How did you happen to begin using DNA as a score?"
Cimela sipped her wine. It was delicious, pale and lightly sweet as moonlight. "My father once gave
my mother a birthday card that was a sheet of music with notes assigned to nucleotide sequences that
resulted in the pigmentation of her hair, skin and eyes. 'The song is you,' I remember him telling her. That
fascinated me. I started playing with DNA tunes. Even the music I wrote for the Rococo Roos had DNA
sequence themes, and later, when I began writing about life that had vanished or seemed about to, what
better than to let the very substance of those animals plead for them? World Primeval sounds like any
symphony, but even its themes are expanded from nucleotide sequences of the shark, lizard, echidna, and
platypus."
Ashendene laughed. "I'm astonished how well it all sounds with such a restricted form, but even more
amazed at the profound emotional effect your music has on people."
That always surprised her, too. "A friend once came up with a theory in an inebriated moment. He said
the response results from resonance, a recognition on a deeply subconscious level of its similarity to the
pattern of our own genetic structure. It's as good as any other explanation I've heard. I'll be interested in
seeing how people react to an alien coding."
The moondust eyes flickered. "I would think they'd feel the same, given that the music uses human
instrumentation."
She frowned. Human instrumentation. Could that be wrong? Perhaps aliens deserved new and more
exotic sounds. She would play with the synthesizer. Which reminded her-- knowing what they looked
like would help her select appropriate sounds. "Mr. Ashendene, I need tapes or holos of the aliens."
He sipped his wine and grimaced. "There aren't any worth seeing."
She shrugged. "I don't care how poor they are; I need something for a basis of the visual track."
"The bodies were too badly damaged to tell much about their appearance. The 'DNA' has been read
from a few cells that froze quickly enough to be thawed without destroying the internal structure."
"Even damaged bodies are worth something," she protested. "Are they large or small? How many
limbs do they have? What's their clothing like? What about the ship?"
The moondust eyes stared into her, then went thoughtful. "I see what you mean. We have holos of the
ship and you'll have them by morning. We're working on a computer reconstruction of the aliens based
on a composite and skeletal structure and you'll have that, too, as soon as it's finished. From what I saw,
the aliens are a bit smaller than we are, covered with... bronze or gold feathers."
Golden bird people? She grinned in delight. Perhaps flutes and strings, or chimes, should carry the
musical theme. She played with the idea in her head the rest of dinner, and afterward programmed the
synthesizer in her room for airy instrumental sounds.
***