"Robyn Tallis - Giants of Elenna - Planet Builders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tallis Robyn)

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely
coincidental.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-91174 ISBN 0-8041-0462-X Manufactured in the
United States First Edition: August, 1989




CHAPTER ONE
Birthday Bonfire

"What was it like, Zach, to be on Earth and have real birthdays?" Daphne Devries asked.

Clea Tburni watched her friend Daphne roll over and peer up at Zach's face. Daphne's long, shining,
magenta-colored hair spilled onto the blue-green grass, catching fiery highlights from the sun riding just
above the the sea.

Next to Clea, Zach said lazily, "What do you mean, real birthdays? Do you get invisible gifts, like invisible
ink, here?" Zach's shoulder-length brown hair drifted in the brisk breeze, and his wide-spaced brown
eyes crinkled slightly, waiting for a joke.

For once it seemed Daphne wasn't making a joke. Her gray eyes looked slightly perplexed, and her long,
wiry hands came up, gesturing quickly. "Earth! Where a Standard year isn't just a meaningless bunch of
numbers on a computer, looked at only when one

has to send a message or note down the official time. It's a real thing. Like, one day you were thirteen,
and the very same day the next year, you were fourteen! Didn't it feel as if that day, each year, belonged
to you?" Daphne sat up and turned toward tall, black-haired Sean Matthews. "You were on Earth! How
about it?"

Clea watched Sean give a careless shrug. She knew that at one time Sean had been bothered by his
family's moving from planet to planet, but he seemed to have come to terms with that. Now he grinned
briefly and said, "I wasn't there long enough to have more than one birthday, and I guess I didn't really
notice that the real date and the standard date matched."

"Some people don't celebrate birthdays," Noriko Wilder spoke up from beside Sean. Her slanted dark
eyes were narrowed against the last bright rays of the sun. "We didn't on Epsi-lon."

"On Acedium we sure did," Will Mornette put in. "We celebrated a lot of stuff. Wasn't much else to do
on that barren rock."

"On Theta we did not," Arkady Davidov put in softly. His light blue eyes turned from Daphne to the path
leading to the cliffs. The strong, light-haired Thetan divided his attention between listening to the others
and watching for Philippa; the pathway was still empty. "But we did celebrate Passage Day, the day the
family landed," he added.

"Well, we celebrated birthdays. Big parties," Daphne said. "Maybe because Felicidad is full of actors and
they all want to be on stage! But to have a day that's yours — I think everyone deserves it. Anyway, I