"Patricia A. McKillip - Fools Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

The navigator touched his arm when he didnтАЩt move. тАЬWeтАЩre here. You want to program
the entry code before we blow up?тАЭ

The commander turned, fingered lights savagely. тАЬSome days I hate this job.тАЭ The red
warning lights around them turned to gold. The cruiser settled in the vast, metallic silence. The
prisoner hid behind her eyes, listening.




FOOLтАЩS RUN




PART ONE
THE QUEEN OF HEARTS

ONE
┬л^┬╗
The Magician sat alone on a stage in the Constellation Club, playing Bach to the robots whirling
a grave minuet around him as they sucked cigarette butts off the floor. Though the walls of the
vast club were a polished, starless black, in the world outside, the sun was just rising. He
changed key in a sarabande, and the blackness washed away in a sudden tide of color. The
walls, now glowing chartreuse, proclaimed it six oтАЩclock in the morning. The Magician and the
robots remained oblivious. Only Sidney Halleck, polishing the oak slab of one of the dozen
bars in the place, gave the change any attention. Something closer to the color of mud, his
wincing eyes told him, would have been easier on the eyes after a night like that.
The MagicianтАЩs fingers wrapped chords neatly together into a resolution, then leaped
forward three centuries. The piano, made over 150 years before, a pre-FWG antique, sounded
gentle but precise in the empty cavern of the club. Sidney stopped caressing the oak and
leaned on it, listening: a big man with a plump, benign face, a massive nose and shrewd, serene
eyes. With its twenty oval stages scattered across the floor, most of them littered with
equipment, the Constellation Club by day resembled a hanger for UFOs. The Magician and the
antique grand, producing weird music in solitary abstraction, like a kind of exhaust, seemed
suddenly to Sidney as unidentifiable as any object that might have descended out of the stars
to land in his club.

The patternless spatter of notes came to an end. The Magician sat still, gazing at nothing,
softly pressing one key over and over. Sidney waited; the B-flat led nowhere. He broke gently
into the MagicianтАЩs reverie.

тАЬWas that Hanro you just played? тАШAurora Borealis CocktailтАЩ?тАЭ

The Magician nodded absently. тАЬDoesnтАЩt translate well to the pianoтАжтАЭ He was still
sounding the key. Half his spare, high-boned face was magenta from the night before. He
trailed a couple of disconnected body-wires from his belt and from his neck-ring. A stardust of
green and magenta glittered in his hair, on the piano keys.

His ear focused finally on the sound he was making; he listened as the air trembled and