"Norman Spinrad - Riding the Torch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

RIDING THE TORCH
Norman Spinrad
I
Flashing rainbows from his skintight mirror suit, flourishing a swirl of
black cape, Jofe D'mahl burst through the shimmer screen that formed
the shipside wall of his grand salon to the opening bars of Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony. The shimmer rippled through the spectrum as his flesh
passed through it, visually announcing his presence with quicksilver
strobes of dopplering light. Heads turned, bodies froze, and the party
stopped for a good long beat as he greeted his guests with an ironic
half-bow. The party resumed its rhythm as he walked across the misty
floor toward a floating tray of flashers. He had made his entrance.
D'mahl selected a purple sphere, popped the flasher into his mouth, and
bit through an exquisite brittle sponginess into an overwhelming surge of
velvet, a gustatory orgasm. A first collection by one Lina Wolder, Jiz had
said, and as usual she had picked a winner. He tapped the name into his
memory banks, keying it to the sensorium track of the last ten seconds,
and filed it in his current party listing. Yes indeed, a rising star to
remember.
Tapping the floater to follow him, he strode through the knee-high
multicolored fog, nodding, turning, bestowing glances of his deep green
eyes, savoring the ambience he had brought into being.
D'mahl had wheedled Hiro Korakin himself into designing the grand
salon as his interpretation of D'mahl's own personality. Korakin had hung
an immense semicircular slab of simmed emerald out from the hull of the
ship itself and had blistered this huge balcony in transparent plex, giving
D'mahl's guests a breathtaking and uncompromising view of humanity's
universe. As Excelsior was near the center of the Trek, the great concourse
of ships tiaraed the salon's horizon line, a triumphant jeweled city of
coruscating light. Ten kilometers bow-ward, the hydrogen interface was
an auroral skin stretched across the unseemly nakedness of interstellar
space.
But to look over the edge of the balcony, down the sleek and brilliantly
lit precipice of Excelsior's cylindrical hull, was to be confronted by a vista
that sucked slobbering at the soul: the bottomless interstellar abyss, an
infinite black pit in which the myriad stars were but iridescent motes of
unimportant dust, a nothingness that went on forever in space and time.
At some indefinable point down there in the blackness, the invisible
output of Excelsior's torch merged with those of two thousand and
thirty-nine other ships to form an ethereal comet's tail of all-but-invisible
purplish fire that dwindled off into a frail thread which seemed to go on
forever down into the abyss: the wake of the Trek, reeling backward in
space and time for hundreds of light-years and nearly ten centuries, a
visible track that the eye might seemingly follow backward through the
ages to the lost garden, Earth.
Jofe D'mahl knew full well that many of his guests found this prime
reality visualization of their basic existential position unsettling,
frightening, perhaps even in bad taste. But that was their problem;
D'mahl himself found the view bracing, which, of course, justifiably
elevated his own already high opinion of himself. Korakin wasn't