"S. P. Somtow - Absent Thee From Felicity Awhile.." - читать интересную книгу автора (Somtow S. P)

He had just gotten, you know, to that line:
Absent thee from felicity awhile…
To tell my story.
and was just about to fall, with consummate grace, into
Horatio’s arms. You could feel the collective catch of breath, the
palpable silence, and I was thinking, What could ever top that, my
God?… and I had that good feeling you get when you know you’re
going to be drawing your paycheck for at least another year or so.
And maybe Gail would come back, even.
Then—
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz. “What’s wrong?” I turned to the little
stage manager, who was wildly pushing buttons. The buzzing came,
louder and louder. You couldn’t hear a word Horatio was saying.
The buzzing kept coming, from every direction now, hurting my
ears. Sir Francis sat up in mid-tumble and glared balefully at the
wings, then the first scream could be heard above the racket, and I
finally had the nerve to poke my head out and saw the tumult in
the audience…
“For Chrissakes, why doesn’t someone turn on the house
lights?” Claudius had risen from where he was sprawled dead and
was stomping around the stage. The buzzing became more and
more intense, and now there were scattered shrieks of terror and
the thunder of an incipient stampede mixed into the buzzing, and I
cursed loudly about the one dim spotlight. The screaming came
continuously. People were trooping all over the stage and were
tripping on swords and shields, a lady-in-waiting hurtled into me
and squished makeup onto my cloak, corpses were groping around
in the dark, and finally I found the right switch where the stage
manager had run away and all the lights came on and the leather
armchair went whizzing into the flies.
I caught one word amid all this commotion—
Aliens.
A few minutes later everybody knew everything. Messages
were being piped into our minds somehow. At first they just said
don’t panic, don’t panic and were hypnotically soothing, but then it all
became more bewildering as the enormity of it all sank in. I noticed
that the audience were sitting down again, and the buzzing had died
down to an insistent whisper. Everything was returning to a surface
normal, but stiff, somehow; artificial. They were all sitting, a row of
glassy-eyed mannequins in expensive clothes, under the glare of the
house lights, and we knew we were all hearing the same thing in
our minds.
They were bringing us the gift of immortality, they said. They
were some kind of galactic federation. No, we wouldn’t really be
able to understand what they were, but they would not harm us. In
return for their gift, they were exacting one small favor from us.
They would try to explain it in our terms. Apparently something
like a sort of hyperspatial junior high school was doing a project on
uncivilized planets, something like “one day in the life of a
barbarian world.” The solar system was now in some kind of time