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

as imperfect a specimen as the machines continued to declare.

Then he had refused to be so tried again, running away twice from the creche school. Finally one of the
authorities, after a week of breakage, sullen rages, and violence, had suggested assigning him to the labor
pool. He had been thirteen then, larger than most full-grown men. They had been just a little afraid of him.
Diskan had a flash of satisfaction when he remembered that. But he had known better than to try to settle
problems with his fists. He had no desire to be condemned to personality erasure. He might be stupid,
but he was still Diskan Fentress.

So he had gone from one heavy work job to the next, and the years had passed—five, six? He was not
quite sure. Then Renfry Fentress had come back to Nyborg, and everything had changed—for the
worse, certainly for the worse!

From the beginning. Diskan had been suspicious of this father out of space. Renfry had shown no
disappointment, no outward sign, after that first moment of blank survey at their meeting, that he thought
his son a failure. Yet Diskan knew that all this existed behind the other's apparent acceptance.

Renfry's attitude became only another "why," giving Diskan almost the same torture as the first "why" had
always held. Why did Renfry Fentress take such trouble to search out a son he had never seen? When
Diskan had been born and his mother had died, the Scout had been traced by the Service as was the
regulation, so that he might express his wishes concerning the future of his child. And the answer had
come back, "Missing, presumed dead," an epitaph for many a First-in Scout.

But Fentress had not died in the black wastes of space, where a meteor hit had doomed his ship to drift.
Instead, he had been picked up by an alien explorer, outward bound on a quest similar to his own, the
hunt for planets to be occupied by a rapidly expanding race.

And among the people of his rescuer, Renfry had found a home, a new wife. When he was again able to
establish contact with his own people, he had received the now years-old report of his son's birth. Since
his new marriage, happy as it was, could have no offspring, he had hunted that son, eager to bring him to
Vaanchard, where Renfry had taken his optional discharge.

Vaanchard was wonder, beauty, the paradise long dreamed of by Renfry's species. Its natives were all
grace, charm, intelligence governed by imagination—a world without visible flaw, until Renfry brought his
son to shatter the peace of his household, not once but many times over!

Diskan dropped his hands from his ears, suffering the discomfort of sound. He held them up to survey
the calloused palms, the roughened fingers. In spite of soothing lotions, the fingertips could still snag fine
garments, window hangings, any bit of fabric he touched. They could smash, too, as they had tonight!
 There was a smear of blood across the ball of his right thumb. So he had more than memory to remind
him of what had happened back there, where the bell-toned notes were rising and falling in a wistful
pattern of music that was not human but that sang in the heart, was a part of the body. Light, sound, and,
now that he had unplugged his ears, he could hear laughter. It was not aimed at him. They were so kind,
so intuitive. They did not use laughter as a weapon; they did not use any weapons. They only
overlooked, forgave, made allowances for him—eternally they did that!

If he could only hate them as he had hated Ulken and his like! There was a fuel in hatred to feed a man's
strength, but he could not hate Drustans, nor Rixa, nor Eyinada, their mother and now his father's wife.
You cannot hate those who are perfect by your standards; you can only hate yourself for being what you
are.