"Lee Killough - Symphony for a Lost Traveler" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killough Lee)

Symphony for a Lost Traveler
by Lee Killough
This story copyright 1984 by Lee Killough. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


They walked in a moving band of light, into and out of darkness. The floor and ceiling panels of the
corridor brightened as Cimela and the butler-- in formal black-and-silver jumpsuit-- entered each new
section; glowing milky white, then dimming out behind them. The passage bored straight through the
moon's rock. A glassy sheen of fused stone reflected back at Cimela between the succession of
contemporary and classic paintings decorating the walls: abstracts by Tanguy, a Bosch, Seth Koerner's
bleak planetscapes, and starships and aliens signed Herring and Whelan.
Cimela frowned. Kerel Mattias Ashendene's artistic taste ran to the fantastic. Why, then, had he sent
expensive shuttle and Moon rocket tickets along with the enigmatic invitation to his lunar retreat-- I
would like to discuss the creation of a truly unique symphony-- to a composer whose work
celebrated nature?
She wished she had been able to learn more about the man than public facts: that his Interstellar
Mining and Drilling, Inc. issued franchises to more than half the independent miners in the asteroids and
Jupiter and Saturn's moons, that he owned controlling interests in numerous other corporations, including
those manufacturing pharmaceuticals and computers and contragrav units. Journalist friends could supply
only two pieces of tape on him, both eleven years old. One recorded his removal from the twisted
wreckage of his sailcar and the other his departure from the hospital months later in a floatchair.
The butler clapped his hands. A section of wall opened to reveal an elevator. "Ask for level four,
madam. Mr. Ashendene is waiting."
He was sending her alone into the lion's den? Cimela reflected wryly.
Near-normal gravity returned briefly, but faded again when the car stopped rising. The doors opened.
Cimela gasped in horror. Before her lay the open surface of the Moon, the side and bottom of a crater
dropping away in a sharp pattern of light and shadow!
For a moment she did not see distorted smear of her reflection on the inside of a transparent surface...
the bittersweet of her jumpsuit a flame beneath her mahogany face and the ebony velvet of her
close-cropped hair. Then breath returned in a gasp of relief. A dome! Even so, stepping out of the
elevator, she felt for the polyplastic to reassure herself.
"You're quite safe," a deep resonant voice said.
She turned toward the sound and found herself in a large, circular room. An assortment of tables and
chairs floated above the glowing floor along with a bed, a computer station, and a desk piled with papers
and minidisc files. Cimela barely noticed the furnishings. Above the waist-high cabinets and bookcases
around the edge-- filled with genuine printed and bound volumes-- the dome and wire lattice generating
its meteor screen rose invisibly, creating the illusion that nothing separated the room from the lunar crater.
Earth hung overhead, a brilliant sapphire suspended against midnight velvet studded with diamonds. With
difficulty, she dragged her eyes from the view to the man gliding toward her in a floatchair.
He extended a hand. "I've been looking forward to meeting you."
"And I you." His hand crushed hers. Eyes the color of moondust slid over her, assessing, dissecting.
Where in them, and in the assured voice, craggy features, gray-touched hair, and iridescent jumpsuit was
the person who bought those paintings? "Tell me about your proposal."
"Will you join me for tea?" He used the controls on one sweeping armrest to back his chair toward a
table floating above the glowing floor.