"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 12 - Trouble Magnet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Time for tea.

The Teacher brewed perfect tea. Many was the time, and more frequently lately than not, he found himself
considering perfection tedious. But not when it came to the making of tea. Darjeeling tea from Terra, anar tea
from Rhyinpine, unique forest teas from Alaspin; the ship was steeped in those and more. Various chemicals both
natural and synthetic for calming the mind and easing the body were available to the Teacher. Except on rare
occasions he disdained them all in favor of flavor in the form of natural tea.

When it was delivered to him in a pot and cup whose functions, if not the material from which they had been
made, would have been recognizable to a tea drinker from a thousand years ago, he stirred in additives, leaned
back, and wondered at how many ancient ship captains had similarly sat and sipped their own favored libation
while studying the stars. They had done so from a considerably different perspective, of course. They had been
sailing along beneath the stars, not among them.

The hot, sweetened, dark gold liquid calmed his body but did little to settle his thoughts. Behind him lay the
threat of the alien Vom, extinguished. Ahead lay a search for something to help deal with an infinitely greater
threat. A search that might well take years. To what end? Not for the first time he wondered why he ought to
bother. What about his own personal priorities? What about the future for himself and Clarity he dared to dream
of in quiet moments? If the evil he had perceived within the Great Emptiness was not due to arrive for hundreds
or even thousands of years, why should he care about it? Why should he have to be the one to sacrifice his life
and happiness in a probably futile attempt to forestall the inevitable?

Everything went in cycles. Perhaps the eventual arrival of the Great Evil represented nothing more than the
ending of one such cycle and the beginning of another. Neither of which, as he lived out his normal life span, he
need be expected to deal with.

Still running away, he told himself as he sipped. The realization burned him more than the hot liquid.

After what heтАЩd seen on Repler, the wild thought occurred to him that maybe he should take drugs to make
himself feel better. Perhaps try something stronger than tea. Given his singular abilities, however, there was no
telling, no way of predicting, what the cost of such an action might be. While he felt he could deal with any
consequences that the sampling of artificial stimulants might pose to himself, there was no telling what kind of
harm such an indulgence involving his increasingly unmanageable abilities might visit on those around him. He
decided that such experimentation was, at least for now, not a viable option.

All right then, the voice inside himself demanded. If youтАЩre going to devote yourself to saving something, maybe
what you need to stiffen your resolve is to prove to yourself that that something is worth saving. That itтАЩs worth
the sacrifice. What he had recently experienced and observed while on Repler was not encouraging. Selfishness,

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 TroubleMagnet

greed, violence. Conscious misuse of intelligence. Willful consumption of sentience-altering drugs. Bloodhype.
The noblest creature he had encountered during his sojourn on ReplerтАФthe one with whom he had personally
empathized the mostтАФhad belonged not to one of the existing races whose future he was being asked to help
save but to a Tar-Aiym named Peot: the last surviving representative of that long-dead, war-like species.

On the other hand, despite his recent, self-challenging, near-defiant, and very brief dalliance with the United
Church officer Kitten Kai-sung, there was Clarity. Not to mention Bran Tse-Mallory, Truzenzuzex, Mother