"Andre Norton - The X Factor 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

XVIII127




I
Even nighttime on Vaanchard was disturbing. It was not a time of peace in which one could hide. There
were gemlike glints in the garden path, a soft luminescence to the growing things, new scents and—

Diskan Fentress hunched over, his chin almost touching his knees, fingertips thrust into his ears. He had
closed his eyes to his surroundings, too—though there was no way to filter those scents out of the air he
breathed. His mouth worked; he was afraid he was going to be thoroughly and disastrously sick, right
here where his shame would be public. Not that anyone would let him see their disgust, of course. The
elaborate pretense that Diskan Fentress was one of them would continue and continue and continue—
He swallowed convulsively.

The greenish moonlight had reached the edge of the path now, awaking the glints to crystalline brilliance.
A new fragrance tantalized his nostrils, but not aggressively. Diskan could not imagine anything in this
garden as aggressive. When created and brought to perfection by the Vaans, a pleasure place was
subtle.

Diskan fought a silent struggle against his heaving insides, against the terrible bonds this garden and the
building from which he had fled, this city, this world, had laid upon him. His trouble reached back farther
than just his coming here to Vaanchard—to a day when Ulken the Overseer had brought a stranger
down to the pond back on Nyborg, had called Diskan out from the murky water, where he stood up to
his middle, green slime smearing his bare body, and had spoken to him as if he were a—a thing—not a
man with feelings and a mind, if not a body, like his fellows.

Now Diskan's breath came in a ragged sob. His eyes might register the path and the strange growth, if
he wanted to look, all the elfin glory of the night, but he saw the past now.

His troubles had not begun by the pond either, but back down the trail of years. His mouth shaped a
grimace, half a snarl of frustrated rage. Way back, that beginning—

He could not remember any time when he had not been aware of the truth, that Diskan Fentress was a
reject—a badly working piece of human machinery that could be turned only to the simplest and dirtiest
of jobs. He did not know how to use the outsize share of strength in his poorly coordinated body,
breaking when he wanted to mend or cherish. And his mind functioned almost as badly—slowly and
stupidly.
Why? How many times had he demanded that in the past, ever since he could think and wonder at all!
But he had learned quickly not to ask it of anyone but himself—and that impersonal power that might or
might not have had a hand in his misfashioning.

Back on Nyborg he had—would they say—"adjusted"? At least being used for the brute-strength jobs
left him mostly to himself during the day, and that was escape of a kind, something he did not have here.

Then, in spite of shrinking from that memory, Diskan thought again of the scene by the pond. Ulken,
filthy, coarse, but still judged infinitely higher in the community scale than Diskan, standing there, a sly grin
on his face, shouting as if his victim were deaf in addition to all the rest.