"Alan Dean Foster - The Man Who Used the Universe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

a third of a meter square, but he would have to endure the odious task alone.
No, he wouldn't trust any of Lal's counterparts. Loo-Macklin hadn't trusted a
human being since he could remember....
--------
*II*
His mother had been a voluntary whore, which is something quite
different from an involuntary one. She enjoyed her work, or perhaps wallowed
in it would be a better description. An intelligent woman who could have
aspired to something more, she apparently savored the endless and inimitable
varieties of degradation her clients subjected her to. It was an obvious case
of a profession fully suited to a state of mind.
Loo-Macklin's father remained a permanent enigma, apparently by mutual
choice of both parents. He had no brothers or sisters. When his mother had
turned him over to the state for raising, at the age of six (just old enough
to appreciate what was happening to him), she'd shrugged him off without a
parting glance.
He had no idea where she was, if she was dead or alive, and he didn't
much care. That day at the ward office was vivid in his memory, if for no
other reason than that it was the first and last time he'd ever cried.
He had a very good memory and the conversation was clear in his mind.
"Are you sure, ma'am," the sallow-faced social clerk had asked her,
"that you don't want to try and raise the boy yourself? You seem to have the
capabilities, both mental and fiscal."
Loo-Macklin had been standing in a corner. That was his punishment for
taking an expensive chronometer apart to see how it worked. The fact that he'd
put it back together again in perfect working order hadn't mitigated his
treatment. He could have turned his head to see his mother and the strange,
tired little man talking, but that would result in another beating later on.
So he kept his eyes averted and satisfied himself by listening closely, aware
that something important relating to him personally was being decided.
"Look, I didn't want the little ghit," his mother was saying. "I don't
know for sure why I've put up with him for this long. Anyway, I'm going off on
a long trip and the gentleman friend I'm going to be traveling with doesn't
want him along. Nor do I."
"But surely, ma'am, when you come back..."
"Yeah, sure, when I come back," she'd said in boredom, "then we'll
see."
He remembered the perfume of her dopestick reaching him in his corner,
rich and pungent and expensive.
"Besides, maybe somebody else can do something with him. I never was
cut out to be no mother. When I found out I was past termination time I
thought of suing the damn chemical company."
"If you were so against raising him why wait 'til now to hand him to
the ward?"
"I think I was drunk at the time of decision-making," she said with a
high laugh that Loo-Macklin could remember quite clearly. It was shrill and
flutey, like an electronic tone but with less feeling.
"Doesn't matter anyway. He's here. I know I should've turned him over
years ago, but I've been busy. Business, you know. Occupies most of my time.
Anyway, I turned around one day and figured out he was always getting