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

file:///F|/rah/Alan%20Dean%20Foster/Foster,%20...an%20-%20Flinx%205%20-%20Flinx%20In%20Flux.txt (12 of 123) [1/16/03 6:49:12 PM]
 file:///F|/rah/Alan%20Dean%20Foster/Foster,%20Alan%20Dean%20-%20Flinx%205%20-%20Flinx%20In%20Flux.txt

Having always managed on his own as a boy, he could certainly do so as an adult.
He would damn well have to find out things for himself instead of expecting
another to do it for him. Why shouldn't he manage? He could do certain things
that so far as he knew no one else could do.
They designed me well, he thought bitterly. My prenatal physicians. The rogue
men and women who had employed his DNA for their plaything. What had they really
hoped to achieve with him and his fellow fetal experimentees? Would they be
proud of him today or disappointed, as they had apparently been in all the
others? Or would they simply be curious, utterly distant and uninvolved? It
could be no more than a matter for speculation, since all of them were dead or
mindwiped.
Well, their subject was preparing to build a life of his own, independent and
unobserved. Already he had crisscrossed a fair portion of the Commonwealth
trying to locate his natural parents, only to discover that his mother was dead
and his father's identity a mystery lost in the mists and rumors that were his
heritage.
That desire to know had driven him for several years. Now he was beyond that. If
he was ever to learn the truth of his genealogy, he would have to pry it out of
some computer storage chip hidden somewhere beneath human ken. Time to put
history behind him and look to his future, which would probably prove as
complicated as his past.
Still, he considered himself fortunate. While his unpredictable talents had
often placed him in trouble, they had also helped to extricate him from it. He'd
had the chance to meet some unique individuals: Bran TseMallory and Truzenzuzex,
Lauren Walder, and others not nearly so pleasant. And then there were the
Ujurrians. He found himself wondering how their tunnel digging was progressing.
The AAnn, too, of course, scheming and plotting against humanxkind, always
searching for a weakness, probing for an opening, watching and waiting to expand
whenever the Commonwealth seemed weak or indecisive.
His thoughts were rambling, but he could not help himself. The crawler largely
drove itself, and now that he had done what he had come to do, he was relaxed
and at ease. He could easily see himself becoming a reclusive mystic, the old
hermit of the trade vectors, cruising back and forth through the Commonwealth
and even skirting its outermost boundaries in the wonderful ship the Ujurrians
had fashioned for him. The Teacher. That was what they called him. A paradox,
since the more he learned, the more ignorant he felt.
Truzenzuzex would have called that a sign of increasing maturity. He was a
student, not a teacher, intensely interested in everything around him: people
and places, civilizations and individuals. He had been exposed to bits and
pieces of great mysteries. Abalamahalamatandra, who had been not a survivor of
some ancient race but instead a biomechanical key for triggering a terrible
device. The Krang, the ultimate weapon of the longvanished Tar‑Aiym, whose
strange mechomental perturbations still echoed through his brain after all these
years. So many things seen, so many places yet to go. So much to try to
comprehend.
Intelligence was a terrible burden.