"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 5 - Flinx in Flux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

different, but at least she did not have a hypocritical bone in her body. She
delighted in being a greedy, money‑grabbing lowlife. He reveled in her honesty.
She was the best human being she could be, given the sad circumstances of her
life.
And what was to become of him? A universe of possibilities lay open to him. Too
many, perhaps. He had not the slightest idea which to reach for.
Nor were weighty questions of philosophy and morality all that obsessed him
right now. There was also, for example, the increasingly fascinating and complex
matter of the opposite sex. As he had spent most of the past four years just
surviving, women remained largely an intriguing mystery to him.
There had been some. The beautiful and compassionate Lauren Walder, many years
ago back on his home world of Moth. Atha Moon, Maxim Malaika's personal pilot. A
few others, younger and less memorable, who had flashed like brief blue flames
through his life, leaving memories that burned as well as confused him. He found
himself wondering if Lauren would remember him, if she was still working happily
at her obscure fishing lodge or if she had moved away, perhaps offplanet. If she
would still think of him as a "city boy."
He straightened in his seat. He had been little more than a child then, and shy
at that. Maybe he was still something of a boy, but he was no longer nearly as
shy. Nor did he look half so boyish. That troubled him. Any change troubled him
because he could never be certain if it was the result of natural growth
processes or his unnatural origin.
Take the matter of his height. He had learned that it was normal for most young
men to attain their full growth by age seventeen or eighteen. Yet he had reached
his full adolescent height by the time he was fifteen and then stopped cold. Now
he had suddenly and inexplicably grown another nine centimeters in twelve months
and showed no sign of slowing. He had gone abruptly from slightly below average
male height to slightly above it. Height changed one's perspective on life as
well as the way others perceived one.
The drawback was that it became harder to remain inconspicuous. It made him feel
less of a boy and more of a man, though when a boy became a man, wasn't he
supposed to be certain about things? Flinx found he was more confused now than
he had been at sixteen, and not only about women.
If anyone had a right to feel confused, it was Philip Lynx, ne Flinx. His was
not a normal mind in a normal body. Better to be confused all the time than
frightened. He managed to keep the fear in the background, out of the way,
locked in the dark cul‑de‑sacs of his mind. It did not occur to him that it was
his fear and confusion that prevented him from making further contact with
members of the opposite sex. He knew only that he was wary.
If only Bran Tse‑Mallory or Truzenzuzex were around to advise him. He missed
them deeply, wondered where they were and what they might be up to, what
mysteries they might be probing with their singularly penetrating minds. For all
he knew, he realized with a cold chill, they might be dead.
No, impossible. Those two were immortal. Monuments both of them, spirit and
intelligence molded in material everlasting, both parts combining to form a much
greater whole. They had their own lives to live, he told himself for the
thousandth time, their own destinies to fulfill. They could not be expected to
spare the time to tutor one odd young man, no matter how interesting he might
be.