"John Dalmas - Fanglith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

- Chapter 1

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file:///E|/mIRC/download/0671559885___1.htm (1 of 10)14-10-2007 13:09:25
 - Chapter 1




ONE

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My name is Larn, and because it was my name day, I hadn't had to go to school. Instead I'd gone hiking,
with a little fishing thrown in.
A name day, in case they don't have them where you are, is—Well, each day of the year has one or more
person's names assigned to it. The day your name falls on is special for you. You get presents, and the
day off from school. My major present had been a fishing gun—a small belt model that can shoot a lure
out as far as eighty feet.
I didn't realize how special, or what kind of special, this name day was going to be for me.
Actually, when I was born they'd named me Lanar, Lanar kel Deroop, but that was before we came to
Evdash. On Evdash we took the name "Rostik." And Larn can be either a given name or, on Evdash, a
nickname for Lanar, so I'm known as Larn Rostik.
There's a reason for the name changing. I was born on Morn Gebleu, about 1,100 parsecs[A parsec is a
unit of distance 3.258 light years long, or 19.18 trillion miles. Units of measurement, such as years and
miles, are ordinarily given here in Earth equivalents instead of Standard.] away. But after we ran away
to Evdash—I was four years old then—our whole family took Evdashian names.
And as soon as we all learned to speak Evdashian without an accent—the languages are really pretty
much alike, especially in writing—we moved to a different district and changed our names again. There
we pretended we'd always lived on Evdash.
The false birth records, identification documents, and things like that were expensive, but dad didn't
want us known as Federation refugees. There was always a chance that Federation agents would come
looking for him. His family had been prominent in Federation politics and government for generations.
Then, when he was eleven, the Glondis Party took over the government and forced through a bunch of
what they called "constitutional reforms," which meant they canceled a lot of the people's rights.
So he'd studied business instead of government, with a lot of science on the side.
When he was twenty-five, the Glondisans threw out the constitution entirely and did whatever they
pleased, which meant putting people they didn't like in jail. And there were a lot of people they didn't
like.
Then dad became a leader in an underground group that published an illegal newspaper. I've always
suspected that he and mom had done other underground stuff, too, that they never mentioned to us.
Anyway, he bought a used space cutter, which was illegal. He also bought a whole data cube on
habitable planets outside the Federation—old colonies, a lot of them. Then he loaded us all in and took
off for Evdash.