"Emil Petaja - Tramontane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

wide dour face, in the animal slope of his thick shoulders, in the
lumbering splayfoot gait his ill-fit cast-off boots displayed. His sackcloth
blouse had been patched up out of hydroponics tank shoddy; his
pantaloons were forever dirty; his thick hairy legs were bare from knobby
knees to half down his knotted calves, whereupon the one mismatched
bright note took over. His synth-wool stockings were self-knitted, unusual
in itself, and they were vivid blue. Kullervo KasiтАЩs stockings brought smiles
even from the quasis programmed to do handwork for the Mothership
computers. From others, colonists and regulars, they brought frowns or
open jeers. They didnтАЩt suit that face, that grotesque body. This odd bid
for beauty was out of keeping. It was a bone of contention for more
universal contempt. He would be better off without them. His ugliness of
form and nature must be unrelieved, total.

Sloughing along across the brittle orange terrain, head adangle,
Kullervo Kasi made no slight demur against his fate. The kicks, when he
didnтАЩt move fast enough, didnтАЩt register. Besides, the Dantesque agony of
twisted rock landscape, plus the near-intolerable heat outside the Colony
Bubble, precluded coherent thought. His fate was a foregone conclusion,
predestined in his genes.

Kullervo Kasi. The name itself was alien. More than just alien, out here
at the star frontier, where alienness was a common commodity. There was
no information about him on his current Mothership, nor indeed on any
of the ten thousand Motherships that wheeled the galaxy and beyond,
spitting out human pips by the thousands and ten thousands whenever
worlds could be found that would tolerate them. Of course Kullervo had
been displaced from Mothership to colony to Mothership to another
colony so often that perhaps it is no wonder that his Nee-ship, not to
mention his age, antecedentsтАФhis very Nee-number on Central
RecordshipтАФwas missing. This, of course, was not entirely new. Births
were of course controlled rigidly but hole-in-corner alliances were not
unheard of among so many billions of billions.

KullervoтАЩs existence was scarcely noteworthy in ManтАЩs great splashout
through his galaxy and well beyond (in Motherships now, the small planet
of his origin was so dimmed that its very mention brought winces of
contempt, as if Earth were a dirty name) in a titanic pattern-wheel that
brushed on some three hundred thousand star-colonies at latest count.
Who cared who he was? Get rid of him! This time hope it would stick. His
Placement card would run through the record-computer again, stamped
тАЬKullervo KasiтАФOrigin Unknown,тАЭ and off he would go. Not for long,
unhappily. His temperament, some aura he cast off, would cause grown
men to shiver and children to hide and throw rocks at him; it happened
over and over again. It happened in direct proportion to the available
space, to the establishment of new colonies so desperate for muscle that
they would take even Kullervo. Robots were expensive. Man was cheap.
And if ever a man was expendable, that man was Kullervo Kasi.

Ryler 8 was finis. The period at the end of Kullervo KasiтАЩs wormтАЩs