"Jack Vance - The Moon Moth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

THE SYMBOLIC adjuncts used to enlarge the human personality are of course numerous. Clothes
comprise a most important category of these symbols and sometimes when people are gathered together
it is amusing to examine garments, unobtrusively of course, and to reflect that each article has been
selected with solicitous care with the intention of creating some particular effect. Despite the symbolic
power of clothes, men and women are judged, by and large, by circumstances more difficult to control:
posture, accent, voice timbre, the shape and color of their bodies, and most significant of all, their faces.
Voices can be modulated, diets and exercise, theoretically at least, force the body into socially acceptable
contours. What can be done to the face? Enormous effort has been expended in this direction. Jowls
are hoisted, eyebrows attached or eliminated, noses cropped, de-hooked, de-humped. The hair is
tormented into a thousand styles: puffed, teased, wet, dried, hung this way or that: all to formulate a
fashionable image. Nonetheless, all pretenses are transparent; nature-fakery yields to the critical eye. No
matter what our inclinations, whether or not we like our faces, we are forced to live with them, and to
accept whatever favor, censure or derision we willy-nilly incur. Except those intricate and intelligent folk
of the world Sirene, whose unorthodox social habits are considered in the following pages.



THE MOON MOTH



The houseboat had been built to the most exacting standards of Sirenese craftsmanship, which is to say, as
close to the absolute as human eye could detect. The planking of waxy dark wood showed no joints, the fastenings
were platinum rivets countersunk and polished flat. In style, the boat was massive, broad beamed, steady as the shore
itself, without ponderosity or slackness of line. The bow bulged like a swan's breast, the stem rising high, then
crooking forward to support an iron lantern. The doors were carved from slabs of a mottled black-green wood; the
windows were many sectioned, paned with squares of mica, stained rose, blue, pale green and violet. The bow was
given to service facilities and quarters for the slaves; amid-ships were a pair of sleeping cabins, a dining saloon and a
parlor saloon, opening upon an observation deck at the stern.
Such was Edwer Thissell's houseboat, but ownership brought him neither pleasure nor pride. The houseboat had
become shabby. The carpeting had lost its pile; the carved screens were chipped; the iron lantern at the bow sagged
with rust. Seventy years ago the first owner, on accepting the boat, had honored the builder and had been likewise
honored; the transaction (for the process represented a great deal more than simple giving and taking) had augmented
the prestige of both. That time was far gone; the houseboat now commanded no prestige whatever. Edwer Thissell,
resident on Sirene only three months, recognized the lack but could do nothing about it: this particular houseboat was
the best he could get.
He sat on the rear deck practicing the ganga, a zitherlike instrument not much larger than his hand. A hundred
yards inshore, surf defined a strip of white beach; beyond rose jungle, with the silhouette of craggy black hills against
the sky. Mireille shone hazy and white overhead, as if through a tangle of spider web; the face of the ocean pooled
and pud-dled with mother-of-pearl luster. The scene had become as familiar, though not as boring, as the ganga, at
which he had worked two hours, twanging out the Sirenese scales, form-ing chords, traversing simple progressions.
Now he put down the ganga for the zachinko, this a small sound-box studded with keys, played with the right hand.
Pressure on the keys forced air through reeds in the keys themselves, producing a concertinalike tone. Thissel ran off
a dozen quick scales, making very few mistakes. Of the six instruments he had set himself to learn, the zachinko had
proved the least re-fractory (with the exception, of course, of the hymerkin, that clacking, slapping, clattering device
of wood and stone used exclusively with the slaves).
Thissell practiced another ten minutes, then put aside the zachinko. He flexed his arms, wrung his aching
fingers. Every waking moment since his arrival had been given to the instruments: the hymerkin, the ganga, the
zachinko, the kiv, the strapan, the gomapard. He had practiced scales in nineteen keys and four modes, chords
without number, inter-vals never imagined on the Home Planets. Trills, arpeggios, slurs, click-stops and nasalization;