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

gaze and turned away from the window. The Al├аntene washed half her
face with fire-shot light, left the other half in shadow. One eye glinted clear
silver, the other was a pale ember in darkness. She looked at him.
"Hello," she said. "I, do not speik, this, well." Her voice was low. Her
EnglishтАФa tongue that this group of Earthmen had the audacity to
represent to the Cian as the Terran languageтАФwas halting and heavily
accented.
"N ├л, it is of no circumstance," Farber answered, in her own language,
which he had learned by subcerebral techniques. It seemed a curiously
evasive tongue to him, its simple grammar and syntax masking a million
quicksilver shifts in meaning that he could never quite grasp. He
wondered if he had impressed the woman with his cosmopolitanism. She
did not speak again, and at last he said, "Hello," belatedly, to break the
inscrutable silence. He felt inane.
She nodded to him with somber formality. Then she smiled, quick and
startling. "Do you"тАФshe gestured with her head at the beachтАФ "enjoy the
Mode?"
"Yes, I do," he answered. Then honesty made him add: "Although I
don't understand it."
"AhтАФ" she said, wisely, squinting a little. "There are many things about
the Modes that are not easy to understand, even for us perhaps, n ├л? But
still we must cope, as best we can." Her tone was both mocking and
melancholyтАФshe was laughing at him, surely, but at the same time he
sensed that she was pleading almost desperately for his company, for his
regard. She seemed lonely, and yet ineffably remote. She spoke with
economy, almost brusque, and yet her manner was relaxed and easy. Her
smile was intense and abrupt, flash, striking like a chisel, goneтАФand yet,
somehow, wistful. Her eyes turned to him again and again. He could see
the liquid flash of them as they moved, to him, away, back. She fascinated
himтАФ almost in the old sense of fascinare, to bewitch, striking him
motionless as a charmed bird. She was wild and sad, and she looked at
him sidelong through the complex, shifting light-and-shadow cast by a
thing that was older than either of their civilizations.
Her name, he learned, was Liraun J├й Genawen. She was taller than the
Cian average, which brought the top of her head up to Farber's
breastbone. She was resting against the window ledge, one long leg tucked
up on the stone and under her, sitting easy and supple on her own calf.
She seemed even more slender than the majority of her slender race, sleek
and litheтАФeven in the minuscule movements of her head and neck as she
sat otherwise motionless on the ledge there was apparent the sureness and
total muscular control that marked the dancers on the beach. Her face
was sharp-edged, angular, her nose straight and heavy, her lips long and
full, her eyebrows like startled black brushstrokes. Her eyes were
enormous, fierce and staring as an owl's or a hawk's. Her skin held
something of the rich, breathing tone of mahogany, though muted and
with more brown in it. Her hair, black, was long, thick-textured and
glossy, and fell heavily about her shoulders. She was dressed in silver and
black, and she wore a tight necklace of amber and obsidian. Looking at
her, Farber realized for the first timeтАФalthough he had known it
intellectually all alongтАФthat Cian translated as "The People."