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

Ahead, straight east, the night opened up into a feeling of echoing, infinite
space. Ocean was there, behind the mistsтАФthe smell of its salt was in the
wet wind that slapped Farber's face, the hissing of its swells and surges
could be heard under the derivative sound of the chant, andтАФbeyond the
ceremonyтАФits waves gleamed in torchlight as they foamed against the
beach.
Farber passed the L-shaped bulk of Ocean House/River House, and
made his way down as close as he could to the water. The Cian were
packed in shoulder to shoulder here, by the thousands. Smoky red
torchlight glinted from teeth and eyesтАФlarge-pupiled, large-irised eyes
and needle-pointed canines. They were all swaying side to side in a slow,
ponderous rhythm, and doing a kind of shuffling dance stepтАФone step
forward, a step back, a step to the side, a step forward again, stamp,
stamp, stamp, stamp. None of this seemed deliberate; the motion was an
unconscious, instinctive response to the music, almost a tropism. The
Cian were preoccupied with the ceremony, all their attention focused
outward, and perhaps they were not even aware that their bodies were
swaying and stamping in the wet smoky dark. After a while, Farber
discovered that he was doing it tooтАФwithout volition and in perfect time,
as if he had been practicing all his life. At first Farber found that
frightening, then oddly exultant, and then both emotions died, and there
was nothing but the chant, the steady mesmerizing motion of the crowd,
the enveloping heat of a hundred thousand close-packed bodies, the
pungent stink of alien sweat.
Beyond the crowd was the ceremony, the Al├аntene itself. The musicians,
playing drums, flutes, and tinkling stringed instruments like dulcimers
and mandolins, sat crosslegged in a huge semicircle just beyond the first
row of spectators, facing the Ocean. Their hands pounded and strummed
and plucked with unvarying, unwavering, inhuman precision, as if they
were all motley close-robed robots, and they rocked back and forth rapidly
in time to their own music. To Farber's extreme left, massed in between
the musicians and the sea, were the chanters, the singersтАФmore than a
hundred brightly clothed Cian, all male, all old: snow-white hair, gleaming
silver eyes, their faces intricately meshed with lines and wrinkles,
expressionless as rock. They were doing a more complex, studied version
of the crowd's step-and-sway, some of them also making ritualized
gestures and sweeps with their hands and arms, others periodically
tossing handf uls of powder into the torches so that they flared up silver
and amber-green and scarlet. Some of them were standing up to their
waists in the water, as the tide rose; they continued to chant,
unperturbed. On the far right, almost out of sight, another group of old
men were involved in what seemed to be a kind of highly stylized dramatic
performance, reminiscent of a Terran N ├┤ playтАФtheir voices, speaking
instead of chanting or singing, cut flatly across the rest of the ceremony
from time to time.
But the center of the ceremony, the heart of the Al├аntene, were the
dancers. They took up most of the torchlit stretch of beach, dancing next
to the edge of Elder Sea on wet, hard-packed sand. There were perhaps
two or three hundred dancers, of all ages, men, women and children. Some
of them were naked, and the flaring torches played strange