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

II


While it was no novelty to be prodded awake by something sharp, this
time an angry difference made Kullervo Kasi leap to his feet faster than
usual.

Where was he? Why could he feel pain? For that matter: why was he?

His eyes told him nothing. It was dark around him, dark and dank and
cold. While his sleep-sanded eyes dug around him for hints, his hands
groped the corner he lay in, finding the stony angles indeed clammy and
tomb-like. The dark and the cold suggested death (not the fiery death of
Ryler 8, surely!), but the biting hurt in his forearm didnтАЩt. He labored his
mind over thoughts of being alive and guessed he must be. His legs and
arms were prickling and tingling as from a long sleep, as his blood began
pumping sluggishly out of his heart and around his arterial channels.

тАЬIf IтАЩm not deadтАжтАЭ All his life Kullervo had talked to himself, since
nobody else would unless it was something derisive or to issue him an
order; usually both. тАЬOr maybe this is Hell? Is this Hell, I wonder?тАЭ
Someplace he had heard about where bad people went when they died,
and there was no doubt at all that Kullervo was bad. Wicked. Evil. He had
been told so often enough and there was no reason not to believe them;
they were so clever and important.

Kullervo sighed.
 He was content, in a way, Before, trying so hard to understand what life
was all about, with nobody patient or interested enough to help him (even
to hook him up to a machine), he had been left with an ever-present sense
of burning shame about himself. Maybe it had something to do with his
mother. He didnтАЩt know much about her, since she died soon after he was
born. She wasnтАЩt much good, he was told or overheard: he couldnтАЩt
remember for sure. What happened was that she had birthed him secretly
behind the trash disposers, then tried to open one of the sealed hoppers
and throw him in. She couldnтАЩt get it open, fainted out of weakness, and
Kullervo was left there for the MothershipтАЩs kitchen menials to find next
morning. Later, when he was five or six, he used to sneak out of the
orphanтАЩs sector of the great wheeling starship and down to the trash
grinders and obliterators. Laying his cheek against the warm thrumming
surface of a giant machine he would imagine it to be his mother. Nobody
liked him, even then, so Kullervo had to flounder out things for himself,
and with his thick skull that wasnтАЩt easy.

His father? Who knows? Perhaps nobody, not even the white stars
salted across the endless skiesтАж

Nobody had liked him, this much he knew all too well. Why? He had
only to look casually into one of the polished surfaces of the great cookers