"Vinge, Joan D. - Snow Queen Cycle 1 - Snow Queen (SLUC)" - читать интересную книгу автора (1981 - Joan D Vinge - The Snow Queen)

music, and wild celebration of the ballroom. The sudden loss of sight
and hearing made him claustrophobic. He tightened his hands over the
instrument kit he carried beneath his cloak.

He heard her amused laughter in the darkness at his side, and
light burst around him again, opening up the small room they stood in
now. They were not alone. His tension made him start, even though he
was expecting it, even though it had happened to him five times
already in this interminable night, and would happen several times
more. It was happening in a sitting room this time on the boneless
couch that obtruded into a forest of dark furniture legs dusted with
gold. The irrelevant thought struck him that he had seen a greater
range of styles and taste in this one night than he had probably seen
in forty years back on Kharemough.

But he was not back on Kharemough; he was in Carbuncle, and this
Festival night was the strangest night he would ever spend, if he
lived to be a hundred. Sprawled on the couch in unselfconscious
abandon were a man and a woman, both of them deeply asleep now from
the drugged wine in the half-empty bottle lying on its side on the
rug. He stared at the purple stain that crept across the sculptured
carpet-pile, trying not to intrude any more than he must on their
privacy. "You're certain that this couple has also been
intimate?"

"Quite certain. Absolutely certain." His companion lifted the
white-feathered mask from her shoulders, revealing a mass of hair
almost as white coiled like a nest of serpents above her eager, young
girl's face. The mask was a grotesque contrast to the sweetness of
that face: the barbed ripping beak of a predatory bird, the enormous
black-pupiled eyes of a night hunter that glared at him with the
promise of life and death hanging in the balance.. .. No. When he
looked into her eyes, there was no contrast. There was no difference.
"You Kharemoughis are so self-righteous." She threw off her white
feathered cape. "And such hypocrites." She laughed again; her
laughter was both bright and dark.

He removed his own less elaborate mask reluctantly: an absurd
fantasy creature, half fish, half pure imagination. He did not like
having to expose his expression.

She searched his face in the pitiless lamplight, with feigned
innocence. "Don't tell me, Doctor, that you really don't like to
watch?"

He swallowed his indignation with difficulty. "I'm a biochemist,
Your Majesty, not a voyeur."

"Nonsense." The smile that was far too old for the face formed on
her mouth. "All medical men are voyeurs. Why else would they become