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

She plunged happily into her doubled task and over the next several weeks used the computer to
create and store the thousands of images that would be projected as the visual track, while at the same
time experimenting with countless nucleotide sequences played against each other in the voices of several
dozen musical instruments... culling, choosing, refining choices. She lived, breathed, and dreamed the
symphony, aware of little else. Even at dinner with Ashendene they spoke only of the work.
He did not appear to mind. He listened intently, and once Cimela looked up from the computer to find
his chair in the doorway, his expression hungry. How long he had sat there Cimela could not begin to
guess, and she eyed him, suddenly aware how isolated the house was, and that leaving would entail more
effort than just hailing a cab, if she needed to escape unwanted attentions.
"Is that part of the final thing?" he asked.
She did not know whether to be relieved or disappointed. His passion was for the symphony, not her.
"Do you like it?"
The hunger flared brighter in the moondust eyes. "It's even better than I dreamed. Have you titled it
yet?"
"How about The Lost Traveler?"
"Perfect. Will you think I'm impatient if I ask how close you are to being finished?"'
"Yes." But she smiled. "I'll answer, though. I'm almost finished. So plan your dinner and give me an
orchestra for rehearsals. Do you really plan to bring an entire orchestra all the way from Earth?"
He smiled back. "No, just around the Moon. The Chinese have a very nice orchestra at the Celestial
Village complex." His smile broadened. "Maybe the samisen is appropriate after all."
***


Now work really began: printing out the score for each instrument, working with the butler to assign
rooms to the several dozen musicians who flooded the house. Her days filled with hours of rehearsals, all
held where the dinner and performance would be given: the ballroom, a dome like the study but many
times larger. How she had missed seeing it before Cimela did not know, for it appeared to sit almost in
the center of the crater, the rugged ringwall rising on all sides.
She had little time to admire the view, however. Though she spoke little Chinese and the conductor
knew even less English, the two of them argued endlessly over tempi and other details.
Ashendene, attending one of the rounds, murmured, "Maybe we should have settled for a
synthesizer."
Cimela shook her head. "I've been through this before. Wu Chien and I will work out our differences
or I'll turn him into Peking duck."
Ashendene raised a skeptical brow, but by the day of the dinner she and the conductor were indeed
bowing and smiling at one another. He shook his head. "Remarkable talent indeed."
The house filled to bursting. Each of the men and women Ashendene had invited moved in with
companions and personal staff. They arrived a shuttle-load at a time from the Americans' Port Heinlein
for two days before the dinner, and though one or two did not arrive until the last moment, by seventeen
hundred hours on the appointed day all were gathering in the ballroom for cocktails.
Ashendene hovered outside the elevator like a king on a throne, greeting his guests and introducing
them to Cimela, who stood beside him in gold velvet.
The group had the glitter of an international opening night, the women wrapped in jewels and
expensive fabrics, the men dressed in elegant formal versions of jumpsuits, kimonos, and dashikis... but it
was neither that nor their names, most of which Cimela failed to recognize, that kept her heart in allegro
tempo. The aura of power curled around them visibly. Without being told, Cimela knew that she shook
hands with the men and women who really ran the world, and whose web of influence extended even out
to the edge of the solar system.
The scene had the surrealism of one of Ashendene's paintings: the tables, impeccably set with the finest
china, crystal, and sterling, arranged in a circle on the milky glow of the floor; and outside the circle the