"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 4 - End of the Matter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"Your offer," the withered woman screamed, "is worthy of a kick in the groin!" She lowered her
voice only slightly. "However, I am an old, weak woman. You are younger, larger, stronger,
healthier, and wealthier." One hand curled defiantly around the hilt of a crooked blade jutting
out from a hole in the dirty brown rag of a skirt. Her other hand held the object under
discussion. "So what am I to do?" she finished expectantly.
"Please don't get so excited," the young man standing across from her pleaded, making quieting
motions at her with his hands as he looked nervously from side to side.
No one in the shifting mob of sidewalk vendors and buyers was paying any attention to the
argument. But, being an outworlder, the young man was sensitive to the old lady's accusations.
After all, he and his bride were scheduled to be on Moth for only three days be- fore moving on to
New Paris with the rest of the tour. The last thing he wanted was to be thrown in jail, on his
honeymoon, for fighting with one of the locals.
"Really," he explained desperately to her, adjusting his rain-soaked mustard-and-puce weather
slicker, "thirty credits is all I can afford. Have some sympathy for me. My wife is back in our
hotel. She's not feeling very well. The daily rain and constant cloud cover is depressing her, I
think. I want something to cheer her up. But we have a long way to travel yet. Thirty credits is
all I can afford for a trinket."
The old woman proudly drew herself up to her full height. Her eyes were now level with the young
man's chest. She held the object of contention firmly in one hand as she shook it accusingly at
him. The slim, graceful bracelet of some silvery metal was inlaid with fragments of polished wood
and stone.
"This wristlet was worked and set by Cojones Cutler himself, infant! Do you have any idea, any
idea, what that signifies?"
"I'm sorry," the youth tried to explain, sniffing, "but I've been trying to explain all along that
I am only a visitor here."
Clearly the woman restrained herself only by some great inner effort. "Very well," she said
tightly, "never mind the honored name of Cojones Cutler," She indicated the oval bulges set in the
bracelet. "Look at these whirlwood cabochons- forget the topazes for now." As she turned the
bracelet, the naturally hardened) polished sap facing the wood broke the dim daylight into points
of azure-and-green fire.
"Hardly a tree in a million has the genetic deficiency necessary to produce such colors, boy.
Hardly one in a million, and those grow only in the far north of Moth, where the nomads hunt the
Demichin devilope. Why, it takes-"
"Oh, all right." The young man sighed, exasperated. "Anything to get this over with. Thirty-five
credits, then." He couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three. His face was soft and
earnest. "We'll just have to stay at a lower-class hotel on New Paris, that's all."
The old woman stared up at him and shook her head in disbelief "You talk of hotels, and me with
three starving children and a husband long dead. You can stand there and talk of hotels, brazen
child, while offering me thirty-live credits for the finest bracelet I've been lucky to get on
consignment in twenty years. Twenty years!" Her voice rose to a hoarse shout again. "Make me a
decent offer or go room with the devil, I say!" she screeched, loudly enough to turn a few heads
in the crowd. "But don't stand there innocently and insult a poor old woman!"
"For Church's sake," the youth pleaded, "lower your voice."
Sheltered beneath a rain cape of Violet-gray charged slickertic, the young man who had been idly
observing the noisy byplay of buyer and seller licked the last sweet traces of thisk-cake honey
from his fingers. Then he rose and sauntered toward the quarreling pair,
Slightly under average height, with smoothly arcing cheekbones and deeply tanned skin, he did not
present a particularly eye-catching figure. A thatch of curly red hair roofed his skull, hair the
color of a field of fireweed on the open tundra. It tumbled over his fore- head and ears. Only the