"James Alan Gardner - Hunted" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

wasn't home.

Just before noon on the third day, I got another visitor... and the peep-monitor showed it was a woman wearing an
admiral's gray uniform. I couldn't very well keep an admiral shut out, so I ran my fingers through my hair, then told the
door to open.
The admiral woman was short and brown and young, with a big purply blotch on her cheek; I couldn't tell what the
blotch was, and didn't know if I was supposed to compliment it or pretend it didn't exist. My twin sister Samantha used
to yell at me, "Edward, when you see a woman has done something special with her face, for God's sake say she looks
pretty." It was easy to tell Sam she looked pretty, because she was always as beautiful as sunshine on a lake. With
other women though, either I sat there tongue-tied, or I'd try a compliment and the woman would just stare at me... like
maybe I was trying to be funny or something. I sure didn't want an admiral to think I was making fun of her face; so I
just ignored her blotchy cheek and gave her my best salute.
It's hard to go wrong saluting. Especially with an admiral.
The woman at my door introduced herself as Lieutenant Admiral Festina Ramos, and said I had to come to the party.
"What party?" I asked. Back when Samantha and I had been on active duty, I couldn't remember navy starships ever
having parties. At least, none that I'd been invited to.
"We're crossing the line in fifteen minutes," the admiral woman said. "You should be there."
I didn't know what she meant, crossing the line; I was pretty sure there were no lines in outer space. When I said
that, she laughed and pinched my cheek. "You're an angel." Then she took me by the arm and leaned against me all
warm and a bit perfumed while she led me to the Willow's recreation lounge.
The perfume was in her hair.

I wasn't so used to having perfumey women take me by the arm. Part of it was just being away from human things for
so long-what with escorting Samantha on her big diplomatic mission, then the long awful time after, it'd been a whole
thirty-five years since I'd gone out in human company. (That made me middle-aged, I guess: fifty-seven ... though with
YouthBoost treatments, I hadn't changed a whit since my twenties.)
But even when I was a teenager on New Earth, I didn't spend much time with women. My father didn't like me being
seen by anyone off our estate. Dad was rich and important-Alexander York, Admiral of the Gold in the Outward
Fleet-and he treated me like a big smeary stain on his personal reputation. Even though it wasn't my fault.
Back before I was born, Dad paid a doctor lots of money to make my sister and me more perfect than perfect: athletic
and dazzling and smart, smart, smart. It didn't matter that gene engineering was illegal in the Technocracy-my father
went to an independent world where the laws were different... or where the police were cheaper to buy off.
The gene-splicing worked real well for Samantha, but with me it only did part of the job. I can do hundreds of
push-ups without stopping, and Sam always called me devilishly handsome, but my brain chemistry didn't come out so
good. Too much of some things, too little of others. So Dad kept me at home for fear his "retarded idiot son" would
embarrass him in public.
I didn't mind so much. He kept Samantha at home too, with all kinds of private tutors. Sam became my private tutor,
so it worked out pretty well. She taught me to be polite and brave and honest, and to think really hard about being
good to people. Later, when we were teenagers, she'd take me on pretend-dates so I wouldn't feel left out: to the
gazebo on the south lawn near the reflecting pool, where we'd dance and dance and dance.
Sometimes I wished I had someone else to dance with- someone who liked me, who wasn't my twin sister. But I never
said that to Sam; I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

On our way to the party, the perfumey admiral woman explained that "crossing the line" meant leaving the Troyen
star system for interstellar space. It was a big moment in any starship flight, the point where you cross out of your
starting system... because the League of Peoples has a law, if you've been a bad person, you aren't allowed to go from
one star system to another. If you try it, they kill you. Not messily or anything like that-you just die the second you
leave the system where you did the bad things. It's like magic; except that there is no magic, just superadvanced
science from races millions of years older than us humans. To the League, we were as stupid as worms on a plate, and
no matter how smart we thought we were, the League was a billion times smarter. No one ever fooled them.