"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 02 - Corundums Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

It was a lean face, with sensuous lips. The eyes were arresting, and more.
Without the huge black contact lenses he had affected the night of their
meeting, his eyes were a blue that was far more striking than hers, with her
coloration. They were sapphire eyes; royal blue eyes, the more startling and
blue against his dark hair and skin. Of course that was by bis choice. They
could have 34 been brown. They were not his eyes. That is, they were his,
but they were not eyes. This time he spoke the code-phrase in his own quiet,
medium-range voice without the electronic distorter built, into the suit's
speaker. The door of his cabin recognized him and opened. "Ah, the wonders of
technology," he said, with his peculiar urbane and over-sophisticated air of
amusement and satire. His sweeping gesture, an ancient courtier's, bade her
enter before him. Janja did. Still she marveled at the fantastic opulence of
this man's shipboard home. He was a pirate, lean and seemingly ascetic while
courtly in his far-out-of-fashion way. He wore unrelieved black-except for the
space-suit, since a black suit in space would have been stupid. But his
cabin! She remembered the first time she had seen it, a month ago shortly
after their hurried departure from Franji and then Franjistation, and she
tried to see it that way again, as if for the first time. (The year or so
since her kidnap and enslavement now seemed a decade. Her month with Corundum
seemed a year-in the most positive way.) On her third day aboard Firedancer
she had risen from his bed, naked, to examine his cabin. . . . One
three-meter-long wall-never a bulkhead, as the bed was not a bunk-was a
hologram of what he told her was a medieval tapestry. It was alive with color.
With animals and richly dressed (and poorly painted) people and flora, the
vista seemed to stretch away a kilometer. That wall commanded one's attention
on entering the cabin, and the spacious feeling was there to stay. The
adjacent wall continued the illusion. To Janja of ever-warm Aglaya it was at
once beautiful and eerie, gaze-demanding and frightening. The title was the
subject: Icebergs. She had never seen icebergs and never dreamed of
35 their existence. She still had yet to see snow. The beautifully blended
colors of this wall were many, and hardly chill, so that somehow this oddly
hued, jagged mass rising out of water seemed not too harsh and cold. It seemed
to be stone. It was not. "The artist was Frederick Edwin Church-a most strange
and unfamiliar name, and without I.D. numbers! He had painted the scene
centuries and centuries ago on Home-world in a year then designated as 1861.
And no, Cor-rundum's researches indicated that icebergs had never truly looked
so beautiful, even at sunset, all in yellow and gold and pink and lavender and
rose and purple and blue and . . . A pirate! This scene, too, stretched away
for kloms and kloms -kilometers and kilometers. Its shadows and depth were
ghostlike and magnificent. Here was majesty, and no person had had anything to
do with its creation. (Yet one had, for this was a painting; not reality but
human fancy and vision.) Janja could, stare at Icebergs. Three meters long by
215 sems tall, it could become the universe. Staring, she felt a part of it.
Losing herself in it. Joining it; going away into it. Shudder and fear it even
while loving it, with a feeling close to reverence. To promote a feeling of
security, the wall a meter or so from the foot of the (large! firm!)
bed-not-bunk was covered with cork of a warm deep gold hue. Corundum had hung
it with various smaller holograms made from paintings. He had to tell her what
that one was-a "horse." And that strange city of domes, that was most ancient
indeed, he told her, and had been called "Al-Madinah." There were twenty-one