"Julian May - Rampart Worlds 3 - Sagittarius Whorl" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

enamelwork.
I touched my altered face and cursed more eloquently. Weird bulges and a Haluk-style
flattened nose. Eye sockets of normal human diameter, slightly smaller than Haluk orbits.
It seemed that I'd kept my human-sized eyeballs, just as my older sister Eve had when the
Haluk tried to demiclone her.
Eve! Her name was Eve. And my name was ...
On the tip of my tongue, which felt strange, as though it were too large for my mouth.
My teeth seemed peculiar, too. The spaces between them were wider than normal.
Under the blanket, my hands explored a body that was humanoid but not human.
Externally, the preliminary genen procedure had turned me into a facsimile of a Haluk,
complete with a wasp waist that was only about 70 centimeters in circumference. But
inside my ridged blue skin were human muscles and human guts and human bones, plus a
discombobulated but swiftly recuperating human brain. I lacked the Haluk elongated
neck and overall slender build. My alien hands groped lower on their inspection tour until
they reached my crotchтАФ
Oh, God! Holy blazing bloody shit! No! Not that!
It was all I could do not to scream my lungs out. Those rucking xeno fiends ...
For a few minutes I felt drowned in a black tide of self-loathing and despair. Then I
remembered that my partially morphed sister EveтАФWho hadn't experienced this
particular indignityтАФhad been restored to her normal human physiology by another
sojourn in the dystasis tank. At the time, it seemed to be a miracle of modern science.
I, too, could be made good as new. The ghastly transformation of my genitals could be
reversed, as could the other changes. Provided that I managed to live long enough, and
escaped from whatever exotic planet the Haluk had stashed me on.
Very slowly I sat up, experiencing nausea and a fleeting dizziness. I was weak as a
new-hatched chick and there was a curious itching sensation at the back of my neck. I
touched it and felt a tiny lump right at the base of my skull. The damned Haluk meditechs
had given me an implant, and odds were it had to do with keeping me under control.
Maybe it was signaling them at this very moment.
My weird blue feet settled onto the floorтАФwood parquet laid out in a minuscule
herringbone pattern, coated with ice-clear "skating rink" glaze a full centimeter in
thickness. It was a labor-intensive human interior design style, ultra-trendy. Just the sort
of thing the fad-conscious Haluk were likely to borrow. I judged that I was being held in
a very upscale alien establishmentтАФcertainly nothing resembling the godforsaken
outpost in the Sagittarius Whorl where I'd gone on the Barky Hunt. Perhaps my captors
had taken me to the planet Artiuk, their colonial capital in the Milky Way...
Which was situated in the Perseus Spur sector of the galaxy, fourteen thousand light-
years from Earth. More memories data-dumped. I'd lived in the Spur myself, on a pretty
little freesoil world called Kedge-Lockaby. Had a house on a tropical island, a yellow
submarine named Pernio II, and a bunch of rascally friends. Once upon a time I'd been a
disenfranchised Throwaway, an ex-cop, a happy-go-lucky charterboat skipper who ran a
sport-diving service for tourists.
But not lately.
Something momentous had happened to me. I had returned to Earth and stayed there
for some years, doing ...
What?
Something to do with politics. Something to do with lawyering. Whatever it was had
keenly interested the Haluk, given my double demicloning and the secrecy attending it.
Unfortunately, the exact nature of my recent terrestrial activities still eluded me, along
with my name.