"Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

“Hoping somebody learns to spin a better thread.”

“I will,” Quin promised. “When I grow up.”

He was five years old.

“Somebody will.” Kerry’s blue eyes looked far away. “Somebody at the Kwan Labs most likely. Back
Sunside.”

“I’m going Sunside,” Quin said. “I’ll find the thread and send it back.”

“Maybe you will.” He breathed his reeking starmist. “But you’ll have to grow up first.”

Quin might have been born on Halo Station if the old Aldebaran had been a faster ship, but he had
come prematurely while they were still in space, six months out from Cotopaxi High and weeks
before they found Janoort. His mother never told him who his father was, and he always wondered.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Jack%20Williamson%20-%20Eldren%201%20-%20Lifeburst.html (17 of 285)10-12-2006 0:56:47
Jack Williamson - Eldren 1 - Lifeburst (v1.1)


Nobody Earthbred. He felt certain of that, because the Earthbred weren’t allowed in Sun country
except to be servants. A dashing Sunblood lover? A space lord, maybe, with fabulous wealth in
Company shares?

Even one of the Kwans?

People said they all had the Romanoff nose. Inherited from a mad monk named Rasputin. When he
asked about that, Kerry gave him a Sun-dollar coin that had an image of the first Tycoon under its
shiny plastic. He frowned at the bright gold head with its considerable nose, and hurried to the mirror
to peer at his own. It looked very ordinary.

Yet he kept on wondering.

His mother never said why she’d come so far away from home. That always troubled him, because
she was never well or really happy at the station. He used to think she must be homesick for Earth and
the skyweb and all the Sunside planets. Longing sadly, he imagined, for all the splendor she had left
behind.

Once she let him see an old holo of her, taken back Earthside. In Sun country, she said, near Vogelkop
Down. Staring, he hardly knew her. She was thin and pale now, with wrinkles around her eyes and
her pale hair worn in a knot at the back of her neck. In the holo, she looked so lovely he ached for her.

The camera had caught her wading off a tropical beach, white water swirling around her knees, her
hair bright as gold, loose and blowing in the wind. Her beauty seemed to light everything around her.
The sky was strangely blue, with giant trees called palms leaning over the breaking waves and magic
towers of white-shining cloud climbing under a dazzling Sun.

Such wonders always awed him. Wind! Clouds! Water not frozen. The endless flatness of the sea and