"Theodore Sturgeon - The Skills of Xanadu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

path were flanked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed.
Bril's narrow black eyes flicked everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-breathing
boy's spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer garment as the
wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a weapon; the rock out-
croppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the birdsongs he heard which
might be something else.
He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious.
Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike land
which surrounded it before he recognized it as such.
It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower beds;
yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there was a roof over
it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by arrangements of
color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and nothing that could be


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locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and the house was one great
window on the world.
Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one
of contempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every
man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum:
he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?
"Tan! Tan!" the boy was shouting. "I've brought a friend!" A man and a woman strolled toward
them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that there could be
no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set very wide apart, and
red--almost orange--hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the same time, their mouths thin-
lipped but wide and good-natured. But the woman-- It was a long time before Bril could let himself
look, let himself believe that there was such a woman. After his first glance, he made of her only
a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in his eyes, in the fact that there could be
hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like her husband and the boy, in the smoky
kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind permitted, into a black-belted tunic.
"He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System," babbled the boy, "and he's a member of the
Sole Authority and it's the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did I," he
added, laughing. "This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina."
"You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson," she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that had
come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head.
"You must come in," said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was not the
separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance.
The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by how
much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy bank. Scattered
here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders; the hand would say
they were flesh. Except for a few shelf- and table-like niches on these and in the bank, they were
the only furniture.
Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril saw
Nina's bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the other
end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the house. A
large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and evidently its wide-
flung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible substance which covered the