"Andre Norton - The X Factor 2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

he slouched away. "You areтАФDiskan Fentress?" Disbelief, yes, there had been
disbelief in that, enough to awaken in Diskan some of the old defiance. He had
waded out of the water, pulling up fistfuls of coarse grass to rub the slime
from him. "I'm Fentress." "So am I. Renfry Fentress." Diskan had not really
understood, not for a whole moment of suspended time. He had gone right on
wiping his big clumsy body. Then he answered with the truth as he had known
it. "But you're dead!" "There's sometimes a light-year stretch between
presumption and actuality," the Scout had replied, but he continued to stare.
And a small hurt, hidden far inside Diskan's overgrown frame of flesh and
bone, grew. What a meeting between father and son! But how could Renfry
Fentress have siredтАФhim? Scouts, assigned for periods of time to planet duty,
were encouraged to contract Service marriages. This grew from the need to
breed a type of near mutant species necessary to carry on the exploration of
the galaxy. Certain qualities of mind and body were inherited, and those types
were encouraged to reproduce their kind. So, Renfry Fentress had taken Lilha
Clyas as his wife on Nyborg, for the duration of his assignment there, a
recognized and honored association, with a pension for Lilha and a promising
future for any children of their union. In due time, Renfry Fentress had been
reassigned. He then formally severed the marriage by Decree of Departure and
raised ship, without knowing whether there would be a child, since his orders
were a matter of emergency. Eight months later Diskan had been born, and in
spite of the skill of the medics, it had been a hard birth, so hard that his
mother had not survived his arrival. He did not remember the early days in the
government creche, but the personality scanner had reported almost at once
that Diskan Fentress was not Service material. Some- thing had gone wrong in
all that careful planning. He was like neither his father nor his mother, but
a retrocession, too big, too clumsy, toe slow of thought and speech to be
considered truly one of a space-voyaging generation. There had been other
tests, many of them. He could not recall them separately now, only that they
were one long haze of frustration, mental pain, discouragement, and sometimes
fear. For some years, while he had been a small child, he had been tested
again and again. The authorities could not believe that he was as imperfect a
specimen as the machines continued to declare. Then he had refused to be so
tried again, running away twice from the creche school. Finally one of the
authorities, after a week of breakage, sullen rages, and violence, had
suggested assigning him to the labor pool. He had been thirteen then, larger
than most full-grown men. They had been just a little afraid of him. Diskan
had a flash of satisfaction when he remembered that. But he had known better
than to try to settle problems with his fists. He had no desire to be
condemned to personality erasure. He might be stupid, but he was still Diskan
Fentress. So he had gone from one heavy work job to the next, and the years
had passedтАФfive, six? He was not quite sure. Then Renfry Fentress had come
back to Nyborg, and everything had changedтАФfor the worse, certainly for the
worse! From the beginning. Diskan had been suspicious of this father out of
space. Renfry had shown no disappointment, no outward sign, after that first
moment of blank survey at their meeting, that he thought his son a failure.
Yet Diskan knew that all this existed behind the other's apparent acceptance.
Renfry's attitude became only another "why," giving Diskan almost the same
torture as the first "why" had always held. Why did Renfry Fentress take such
trouble to search out a son he had never seen? When Diskan had been born and