"Frank Herbert - Seed Stock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Technicians available to her, Honida had reached down into the Labor pool to tap the one they all called
'Old Ugly.' He wasn't old, Kroudar reminded himself. But he knew the source of the name.This place
had worked its changes on him with more visible evidence than upon any of the others.

Kroudar held no illusions about why he had been brought on this human migration. It was his muscles
and his minimal education. The reason was embodied in that label written down in the ship
manifest-laborer. The planners back on Mother Earth had realized there were tasks which required
human muscles not inhibited by too much thinking. Thekroudars landedhere were not numerous, but
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they knew each other and they knew themselves for what they were.

There'd even been talk among the higher echelons of not allowing Honida to choose him as mate.
Kroudar knew this. He did not resent it particularly. It didn't even bother him that the vote among the
biologists-they'd discussed his ugliness at great length, so it was reported- favored Honida's choice on
philosophical rather than physical grounds.

Kroudar knew he was ugly.

He knew also that his present hunger was a good sign. A strong desire to see his family grew in him,
beginning to ignite his muscles for the climb from the beach. Particularly, he wanted to see his twins, the
one yellow-haired like himself, and the other dark as Honida. The other women favored with children
looked down upon his twins as stunted and sickly, Kroudar knew. The women fussed over diets and
went running to the medics almost every day. But as long as Honida did not worry, Kroudar remained
calm, Honida, after all, was a technician, a worker in the hydroponics gardens.

Kroudar moved his bare feet softly in the sand. Once more, he looked up at the bluff. Along the edge
grew scattered native trees. Their thick trunks hugged the ground, gnarled and twisted, supports for
bulbous, yellow-green leaves that exuded poisonous milky sap in the heat of the day. A few of the
surviving Earth-falcons perched in the trees, silent, watchful.

The birds gave Kroudar an odd confidence in his own decisions. For what do the falcons watch, he
wondered. It was a question the most exalted of the colony's thinkers had not been able to answer.
Search 'copters had been sent out following the falcons. The birds flew offshore in the night, rested
occasionally on barren islands, and returned at dawn. The colony command had been unwilling to risk its
precious boats in the search, and the mystery of the falcons remained unsolved.

It was doubly a mystery because the other birds had perished or flown off to some unfound place. The
doves, the quail-the gamebirds and songbirds-all had vanished. And the domestic chickens had all died,
their eggs infertile. Kroudar knew this as a comment bythis place, a warning for the life that came from
Mother Earth.

A few scrawny cattle survived, and several calves had been bornhere. But they moved with a listless gait
and there was distressed lowing in the pastures. Looking into their eyes was like looking into open
wounds. A few pigs still lived, as listless and sickly as the cattle, and all the wild creatures had strayed off
or died. Except the falcons.