"Gardner Dozois - Strangers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

now they came up, and Fred Lloyd gave Brody a shove to get him walking
in the right direction again. Ed Lacey and two friends went by, sniffing
narcotic atomizers, followed by Janet LaCorte, who gave Farber a
disapproving look as she passed; she was Kathy's friend. Lloyd was
wearing a complex expression of condescending boredom thatтАФit
occurred to FarberтАФmust have taken him years of diligent practice to
perfect. "You coming?" Lloyd asked. Farber shook his head. Lloyd
shrugged, and the Earthmen went on. Farber was glad to see them go.
Soured by the futility of the Terran enterprise, they were all
self-consciously cynical and bitter, and liked to think that they were
projecting an air of fin de siecle decadence. Actually, they were boring.
Farber plunged into the thick of the crowd and started worming his way
through the dense mass of bodies. He was filled with disgust and
self-contempt. Kathy had only been his lover for a few days, and already
she was so sure of him that she could laugh at him and walk away into a
festival crowd, sure that he would be waiting for her when she chose to
come back to him. And he would be. Once he'd swallowed that, his anger
died to a dull resignation. Light-years from his home and his people, he
had to hang on to somethingтАФand she was it. Sullenly, he kept walking.
He had run out of road. He was on sand now, and it shifted and whispered
under his feet. A row of sand dunes rose up in front of him, interlaced and
overgrown with tough sea-grass and ironwood shrub.
He came up over a dune, and saw the Al├аntene spread out below him.
He paused, swaying, a little drunk, alone in the alien night. He was a big,
slow-moving man, bullet-headed and bull-necked, with dark eyes and a
shaggy mane of blond hair. He had a blunt, big-boned face, dominated by
thick flat cheeks and a massive, stubborn jawтАФsquare, jutting and
truculent. It was an arrogant face, touched permanently now by a shadow
of wistful puzzlement. His eyes were incongruously lost and vulnerable, set
against those rough-hewn, brutal featuresтАФas if there was a frightened
child inside, peering out, running the massive body by manipulating
pedals and levers. The long, bone-deep soughing of the chant came up and
hit him in the face, and the patient elemental thunder of the drums shook
the dune under his feet, sending little rivulets of sand whispering down
toward the beach. Listening now, as his anger died, he was submerged
again by that endless sea-sound, drowned, dissolved, whirled away like a
grain of sand in the tide, to be rolled across the secret places of the ocean
bottom and then washed back to the shore after a decade or a thousand
years. Calmly, he began to descend the dune, digging his heels in. He felt
that if he should fall, or jump, the huge noise of the Al├аntene would puff
up to meet him, bearing him up, and he could ride the sound as a gull
rides the currents of the airтАФ
Here the River Aome, rolling out of the west, met the sea, Elder Sea, the
Great Northern Ocean, the World-Ocean. The Aome was a roaring gray
turbulence to the right, a streak of lighter darkness rolling through a dead
black night, more sensed and heard than seen. To the left, and at right
angles to Farber's path, the dunes stretched away in an unbroken line to
the north; they, and their fringe of beach, extended for more than three
hundred miles, ruler-straight: the North Shore of Shasine. South, beyond
the Aome and invisible now, were endless leagues of saltwater marsh.