"Steve Perry - Matador 5 - The 97th Step" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

TWO

His FATHER HAD been waiting with the strap when Mwili finally got home.

The boy's belly went hard and fluttery at the sight, and his bowels clenched
against the remembered pain.

Not the strap. Not tonight. Not after today.

Full dark had fallen across the dusty land of Cibule, bringing with it the night's
harder chill. Overhead, the Three Moons played their winter's variation on the
High Right Triangle, shedding their pale blue, pink and silvery white lights over
Cibule, itself a moon, and the largest of Kalk's four satellites. Kalk was below the
horizon this week, and its cloudy surface was invisible from the cold farm lands of
the Eastern Hemisphere. The rancid stink of the seed crop battled with the dry
odor of dust, and the air's stench was worse for the combination. Mwili had grown
up with these scents, and yet, every time he left and came back, it was as if he'd
inhaled them for the first time. They never smelled any better.

At sixteen terran-standard years, Mwili Kalamu was work-strong and sturdy, if not
tall, and within two centimeters and four kilos of his father's height and weight. He
could fight back and maybe even win, but that would be a mistakeтАФMafuta had
both God and the Law on his side, as he pointed out endlessly, and on Cibule, one
was the same as the other. Mwili's bare hands were cold, and the warmth of his
body leaked out through half a dozen worn spots on his heavy work gi and baggy

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 Perry, Steve - The 97th Step


cotton twill pants. Fortunately, his boots were of cast dotic plastic, and proof
against the low temperatures. He had collected and sold tourist rock, saving every
demistad for seven months to buy those boots, and had been whipped for the sins
of Desire and Pride when he'd brought them home. Since they were custom-made,
his mother had finally prevailed upon his father to allow him to wear them. They
couldn't be returned, after all, and waste-not-want-not might not be a Holy Rule,
but it was a farmer's creed, right enough.

Despite the evening's hard chill, Mwili wiped muddy sweat from his forehead with
the back of one deeply tanned hand. Work-sweat, some, but mostly from fear.
Unlike most of the settlers on this moon, his ancestors had been of terran
Germanic/Nordic stock, and his natural skin color was pale, his eyes green, like
his mother's. Eyes that now fed a message to his brain it plainly did not wish to
accept, given the fight-or-flight reactions that brain was producing.

There, his father, dangling the strap.

When he was within two meters of the man, he stopped, and waited for Mafuta to
speak. He was the elder, and such was his right.