"Sheri S. Tepper - After Long Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

Watchers, a normal reaction. Even experienced caravaners sometimes sat for an hour or more simply
looking at a Presence as though unable to believe what they saw. Most passengers traveled inside
screened wagons, often dosed with tranquilizers to avoid hysteria and the resultant fatal noise. These
students were looking on the Presences at close range for the first time. Their heads moved slowly,
scanning the monstrous crystals, from those before them to all the others dwindling toward the horizon.
South, at the limit of vision, a mob of pillars dwarfed by distance marked the site of the Far Watchlings
with the monstrous Black Tower hulked behind them, the route by which they would return. They knew
that there, as here, the soil barely covered the crystals. Everything around them vibrated to the eager
whining, buzzing, squeaking cacophony that had been becoming louder since they moved toward the
ridge.

The Watchers knew they were there.

"Presumably you've decided how you want to assign this?" Tasmin usually let his first trippers decide
who sang what, so long as everyone took equal responsibility. "All right, move it along. Perform or
retreat, one or the other. The Presences are getting irritated." Tasmin controlled his impatience. They
could have moved a little faster, but at least they weren't paralyzed. He had escorted more than one
group that went into a total funk at the first sight of a Presence, and at least one during which a neophyte,
paralyzed with fear, had flung himself at a Presence.

"Clarin will sing it, sir, if you don't mind. James and I will do the orchestral effects." Refnic was a little
pale but composed. Clarin seemed almost hypnotized, her dark brows drawn together in a concentrated
frown, deep hollows in her cheeks as she sucked them in, moistening her tongue.

"Get on with it then."

The mules hitched to the trip wagon were trained to pull at a steady pace, no matter what was going on.
Refnic climbed into the wagon and settled at the console while James crouched over the drums. Clarin
urged her animal forward, reins clipped to the saddle hook, arms out.

"Tanta tara." The first horn sounds from the wagon, synthesized but not recorded. Somehow the
Presences always knew the difference. Recorded Passwords caused almost instant retaliation. The drum
entered, a slow beat, emphatic yet respectful. Duma duma duma. Then the strings.

"Arndaff duh-roomavah," Clarin sang in her astonishingly deep voice, bright and true as a bell. "Arndaff,
duh-roomavah." With the first notes, her face had relaxed and was now given over to the music in blind
concentration.

The squeaking buzz beneath their feet dwindled gradually to silence. The mules moved forward, slowly,
easily on their quiet shoes, the muffled sound of their feet almost inaudible.

Flawlessly, the string sounds built to a crescendo. The drum again, horns, now a bell, softly, and Clarin's
voice again. "Sindir, sindir, sindir dassalam awoh."

The mules kept up their steady pace, Clarin riding with Tasmin close behind, then the wagon on its
soft-tired wheels, and the two riderless animals following. The synthesizer made only those sounds it was
required to make. Muffled wheels and hooves were acceptable to the Presences, though any engine
sound, no matter how quiet, was not. No mechanical land or aircraft of any kind could move about on
Jubal except over deepsoil where the crystalline Presences were cushioned by fifty meters or more of
soft earth from the noise going on above them. Since such pockets of soil were usually separated from