"Robert F. Young - Invitation to the Waltz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

considerable length upon the Freudian conflict implicit in the matrix world's passion for hiding or
disguising light sources and its concomitant passion for life-styles lifted from the dark pages of the past.
As for the music, it was undoubtedly taped and had probably been activated, along with the light, by the
opening and/or closing of the inner-lock.
The mini-instrument panel inset just below eye-level in his helmet indicated an amenable atmosphere,
a congenial temperature and a gravity twice that of the patrol craft's. He had surmised as much from the
condensation (now dispersed) that had filmed his visor and from an increased heaviness of his limbs.
Nevertheless, he did not remove his suit. The instrument panel was neither omniscient nor infallible, and
there was no need for him to remove his suit in any case.
Despite the music, despite the amenable atmosphere, despite the congenial temperature, he didn't for
one instant believe that the station contained any living beings other than himself. He began walking down
the corridor toward the source of the music. The reddish radiance made everything seem unreal,
umpugned his own reality. He could hear a faint humming sound in the background and knew that ancient
suction fans were at work, circulating the dead air, cleansing it, replenishing its oxygen content from
hidden hydroponic vats. Like most such matrix-world stations, this one was self-perpetuating.
Presently the corridor debouched into a huge, balconied room. Suspended from the lofty ceiling was
a rotating chandelier in the shape of a barred-spiral nebula. The radiance raining down from it ran the
gamut of the spectrum, successively bathing the floor and the dancers below in red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo and violet light. Staring at the whirling dancers, noting their formalized steps and
elegant evolutions, D'etoile realized that the musical composition to which they were dancing was a waltz
— a waltz composed centuries before they were born; resurrected like the room to titillate a civilization in
which art had atrophied and died.
The dancers, for all their seeming reality, were no more than projections — projections emanating
along with the music from an audio-visual tape-bank hidden in the walls. Probably they had been taped
when the waltz-tape was in progress and were now an inseparable part of it. Some of them, no doubt,
were the ghosts of the dead who sat at the encompassing tables, watching.
Not all of the dead "watched." Some had slipped from their chairs and lay like bags of bones upon
the floor. Others had slumped forward onto the tables, phalanxes encircling the stems of empty glasses.
Most of the tables were empty.
D'etoile raised his eye's to the balcony that ringed the room, to the doors it gave onto. The thought of
what he might find beyond their enigmatic panels made him shudder.
The waltz ended, the dancers vanished from the floor. Immediately another waltz began and other
dancers —or perhaps the same ones — appeared. Revolted, fascinated, he studied the phantasmagoria
before him, unaware of his ambivalence. The women —girls — were in their late teens and early
twenties. They wore outlandish décolleté gowns of lurid hues; their hair was heaped into grotesque
coiffures; their faces were gruesome with rouge. The men were of various ages: some were young, some
old, most of middle years. All wore formal attire —black suits, black ties, black shoes.
The dead were dancing with the dead.
That was Wilde, wasn't it?
Yes. Oscar Wilde. A revenant himself. Haunting the dark streets after his disgrace. Penning Reading
Gaol.
Sick world, D'etoile thought. Robbing its own past like a common thief. Building catellites in the sky
instead of cathedrals. Fucking the iceman when it was betrothed to the farthest star.
Old Whore-Mother Earth.
Again he raised his eyes to the balcony, to the enigmatic doors. He traced the railing around to where
it curved down to the ballroom floor, to where the stairs began. He found himself mounting them with
reluctant tread. There would be records somewhere that would tell him all he needed to know, but a
macabre curiosity compelled him to find out all he could firsthand.
He tried the first door he came to. It was locked. He tried another and another. At length he came to
one that yielded to his touch and he stepped into the room beyond. It was a small room, permeated with