"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 2 - Tar Aiym Krang" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

the Moment might come at any time, and she wanted it to brush his life as lightly as possible.
Flinx felt the cottony pain of a sugar-coated probe again in his mind; the knowledge that
Mother Mastiff was his mother by dint of sympathy and not birth. Coincidence was his father and
luck his inheritance. Of his true parents he knew nothing, nor had the auctioneer. His card had
been even more than usually blank, carrying not even the most elementary pedigree. A mongrel. It
showed in his long orange-red hair and olive complex ion. The reason for his orphanhood would
remain forever as obscure as their faces. Pic let the life flood of the city enter his mind and
submerge the unpleasant thoughts.
A tourist with more insight than most had once remarked that strolling through the great
central marketplace of Drallar was like standing in a low surf and letting the geometrically
patient waves lap unceasingly against one. Flinx had never seen the sea, so the reference remained
obscure. There were few seas on Moth anyway, and no oceans. Only the uncounted, innumerable lakes
of The- Blue-That-Blinded and shamed azure as a pale intonation.


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The planet had moved with unusual rapidity out of its last ice age. The fast-dwindling ice
sheets had left its surface pock marked with s glittering lapis-lazuli embroidery or lakes, tarns,
and great ponds. An almost daily rainfall maintained the water levels initially set by the
retreating glaciers. Drallar happened to be situated in an exceptionally dry valley, good drainage
and the lack of rainfall (more specifically, of mud) being one of the principal reasons for the
city's growth. Here merchants could come to trade their goods and craftsmen to set up shop without
fear of being washed out every third-month.
The evaporation-precipitation water cycle on Moth also differed from that of many
otherwise similar humanx-type planets. Deserts were precluded by the lack of any real mountain
ranges to block off moisture-laden air. The corresponding lack of oceanic basins and the general
unevenness of the terrain never gave a major drainage system a chance to get started. The rivers
of Moth were as uncountable as the lakes, but for the most part small in both length and volume.
So the water of the planet was distributed fairly evenly over its surface, with the exception of
the two-great ice caps al the poles and the hemispheric remnants of the great glacial systems.
Moth was the Terran Great Plains with conifers instead of corn.
The polyrhythmic chanting of barkers hawking the goods of a thousand worlds formed a
nervous and jarring counter-point to the comparatively even susurrations and murmurings of the
crowd. Flinx passed, a haberdashery he knew and in passing exchanged a brief, secret smile with
its owner. That worthy, a husky blond middle-aged human, had just finished selling a pair of
durfarq-skin coasts to two outlandishly dad outworlders ... for three times what they were worth.
Another saying trickled lazily through his mind. 'Those who come unprepared to Drallar to buy
skin, inevitably get.'
It did not offend Flinx's well-considered set of ethics. This was not stealing. Caveat
emptor. Fur and fibres, wood and water, were Moth. Can one steal seeds from a tomato? The seller
was happy with his sale, the purchasers were pleased with their purchase, and the difference would
go to support the city in the form of welfares and grafts anyway. Besides, any outworlder who
could afford to come to Moth could damn well afford to pay its prices. The merchants of Drallar
were not to any extent rapacious. Only devious.
It was a fairly open planet, mostwise. The government was a monarchy, a throw back to the
planet's earlier days. Historians found it quaint and studied it, tourists found it picturesque
and frozepixed it, and it was only nominally terrifying to its citizens. Moth had been yanked
abruptly and unprepared into the vortex of interstellar life and had taken the difficult