"George Mann - The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mann George)

round? Sprayed with acid or minced with shrapnel in some Ha Jiin booby
trap? The other menтАФand there were some female soldiers tooтАФfelt pity
for him. And also shame, at being relieved that it wasnтАЩt them forced to
wear the healing black mask.

But he wasnтАЩt healing. Because he wasnтАЩt wounded, at least not in the
ways they speculated on.

He was simply hiding his face.

Though he knew it would, his face shouldnтАЩt have shocked the others
in a purely physical sense. After all, this was Punktown. The city had been
called Paxton when Earth colonists had first founded it, but it hadnтАЩt taken
long for its nick-name to come about, for its predestined character to make
itself manifest. Over the decades, races other than human had come to
colonize the city as well. Included among the few truly humanoid races that
dwelt within the megalopolis were the ChoomтАФindigenous to this world,
which the Earth colonists had renamed Oasis. They had frog-like mouths
that sliced their faces back to their ears. Then there were the Tikkihotto,
who in place of eyes had bundles of clear tendrils that squirmed in the air
as if to assemble vision with their sensi-tive touch. But there were far
stranger beings in Punktown. Beautiful, by the Earthly conception of such
things, or hideous. In addition, there were mutants of every deformity,
corresponding to every cruel whim of nature (nature as distorted through
pollution and radiation). So it would seem illogical that anyone in Punktown
would feel self-conscious enough to hide their features by pretending to
have been disfigured. But it wasnтАЩt simply self-consciousness that had
caused the young man to don his mask.

It possibly went so far as self-preservation.

тАЬSantos, Edgar,тАЭ a voice called from a speaker. The name was
spelled out on a screen as well, and showed SantosтАЩs military ID number.
The man in the black mask looked up and watched as Edgar Santos
pushed away the little VT he had been watching, affixed to the arm of his
chair. He head-ed off to one of the offices, its number also displayed on
the information screen. Santos. There were a few more names to be called,
alphabetical-ly, before they got to the masked man. Stake, Jeremy.

Stake sat in a long row of plastic chairs of a ter-rible orange color. His
row faced a row opposite. Trying not to look at the people seated across
from him, despite how they stole glances at him, Stake couldnтАЩt help but be
reminded of the first time he had been sent to the planet of the Ha Jiin. The
dimension of the Ha Jiin.

It had been over four years ago. The then nine-teen year-old Jeremy
Stake had sat with a group of young men and women, humans and
humanoids, with no Ha Jiin blood yet on their hands. None of their own
blood yet spilled. They had sat just like this, in two rows inside a metal
Theta pod, waiting to have their material beings shifted. Smuggled inside a