"Stephen Goldin - Scavenger Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

hence to dangle it so nonchalantly betrayed a sign of true sophistication.
On anyone else, the outfit would have been outré—on her, it was
heart-stopping.

The pair of eyes that looked the longest and hardest at Tyla deVrie's
entrance belonged to a young man seated by himself at a table in a far
corner of the hall. Mistress deVrie did not notice any of this, nor would she
have cared even if she had.

Johnathan R was an android—and as such was considered a nonperson
in the eyes of the Society. As an officially registered contestant in the
Scavenger Hunt, he could not legally be excluded from this party. But that
did not make him welcome here. Everything that had happened to him so
far tonight reinforced his status as an outcast.

Nobody would talk to him. None of the women would dance with him,
despite the fact that he'd been made to look moderately attractive. He was
alone at the center of a no-man's-land circle five meters across—an
intangible cage that moved along with him. Outside the invisible bars,
people stared in at him unabashedly and discussed him among themselves
as though he were some dumb beast in a zoo.

Staring up at Tyla deVrie made him realize the ludicrousness of his
own position. There she was, symbolizing the epitome of Society's
ideals—beauty, grace, wit, intelligence, youth and, not incidentally, wealth.
She had been born to this world of glamor and manners and moved
through it as effortlessly as a springtime breeze.

In contrast, he was an artificially-created human being, only three
years out of the vat, though with a body looking closer to twenty years old.
Nearly every second of his short life had been spent learning what he
would need to know to compete in the Scavenger Hunt—how to pilot a
ship, how to astrogate through hyperspace, how to keep his mind alert
and his body fit for the other arduous trials in store. He'd been given a
thorough grounding in all aspects of the physical and technical sciences.
The only thing he didn't know was how to deal with people.

Why am I even here? he wondered suddenly. My presence is only
making me and everyone around me uncomfortable.

But even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. It had been
drilled into his skull just as rigidly as any of the other principles of his
training. He was here to win, to show human beings that androids were
something more than second-class citizens.

Space, but she's beautiful, he thought, still gazing at the goddess in the
doorway. Then, with a sigh, he turned his attention back to the drink
before him on the table and contemplated his loneliness.

Ignorant of these attentions, Tyla deVrie stood on the small balcony