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

go to his concert, love, I'll bet he has some tickets he'd make availableтАФfor his family." Which seemed to
do the trick for she stopped sulking and talked with him, and when night came, she said she was too tired
but didn't insist upon it after he kissed her.

Still, their lovemaking was anything but satisfying. She seemed to be thinking about something else, as
though there were something she wanted to tell him or talk to him about but couldn't. It was the way she
behaved when she'd spent money they didn't have, or was about to, or when she flirted herself into a
corner she needed his help to get out of. He knew why she did those things, testing him, making him
prove that he loved her. If he asked what was bothering her before she was ready to tell him, it would
only lead to accusations that he didn't trust her. One of these days, they'd have to take time to work it
out. One of these days he would get professional help for her instead of endlessly playing daddy for her
in the vain hope she'd grow up. He had made himself this promise before. Somehow there never seemed
to be time to keep itтАФtime, or the energy to get through the inevitable resentment. Looking at her
sleeping face, he knew that Celcy would regard it as a betrayal.

Sighing, unable to sleep, he took his let-down, half hostile feelings onto the roof. It was his place for
exorcising demons.

Virtually every house in Deepsoil Five had a deck or small tower from which people could watch
approaching caravans or spy on the Presences through telescopes. He had given Celcy a fine scope three
years ago for her birthday, but she had never used it. She didn't like looking at the Presences, something
he should have realized before he picked out the gift. Back then he was still thinking that what interested
him would interest her.

"A very masculine failing." His mother had laughed softly at his rueful confession. "Your father was the
same way." And then, almost wistfully, she added, "Give her something to make her feel treasured. Give
her jewelry next time, Tas."

He had given her jewelry since, but he'd kept the scope. Now he swung it toward the south. A scant
twenty miles away the monstrous hulk of the Enigma quivered darkly against the Old Moon, a great, split
pillar guarding the wall between the interior and the southern coast. Was the new score really a password
past the Presence? Or would it be just one more failed attempt, ending in blood and death? The Enigma
offered no comment, simply went on quivering, visibly occulting the stars at its edge in a constant shimmer
of motion.

He turned to the west in a wide arc, ticking off the Presences along the horizon. Enigma, Sky Hammer,
Amber Axe, Deadly Dozen, Cloud Gatherer, Black Tower, the Far Watchlings, then the western
escarpment of crowded and mostly unnamed Presences. A little south of west were the Twin Watchers.
The Watcher score was one of the first Passwords he had ever learnedтАФa fairly simple piece of singing,
with phonemes that were easy to get one's tongue around. "Arndaff duh-roomavah," he chanted softly,
"sindir dassalam awoh," wondering as he occasionally did if there was really any meaning in the sounds.
Official doctrine taught there was not, that the sounds, when properly sung and backed up with
appropriate orchestration, merely damped the vibration in the crystalline Presences, thus allowing
caravans to get through without being crushed. Or dismembered. Or blown away by scattering shards of
crystal.

Although ever since Erickson there had been people who believed implicitly in the language theory. Even
now there were a few outspoken holdouts like Chad Jaconi, the Master Librarian, who believed that the
sounds of the librettos were really words, and said so. Jaconi had spent the last forty years making a
dictionary of tripsong phonemes, buying new translators from out-system, trying to establish that the