"Jo Walton - Tradition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Walton Jo)

Tradition
by Jo Walton


There was a man called Walter who was born out of a tank. It shouldn't have been so
unusual, after all, when Pyrite was settled everyone had been born out a tank -- they only
sent enough people from Earth to run the equipment and get all the babies started and bring
them up. They kept right on running those tanks, too, until there were enough grown up
people to have babies of their own, people to populate Pyrite City and Great Canyon and
Simbardo and clear out to Fool's Gold, people enough to be talking about building cities off
on the other side of the Bumpy Mountains.

By the time Walter was born they were only running the tanks if the children of the children of
the first tank children didn't have enough children. There would be numbers in the news on
Landing Day every year, how many babies had been born, and if it wasn't enough, how
many tank babies would be born to make up. So having tank babies meant people weren't
doing as much as they could, and that meant that tank babies were bad, and pretty soon the
whole idea of tank babies got to be embarrassing and not to be mentioned around nice
people.

Walter grew up well enough in the orphanage, and qualified as an engineer. When he was
twenty-four he met and married a nice girl called Maud, who was prepared to overlook his
shortcomings of background because she loved him. His shortcomings weren't very obvious
as shortcomings, to tell the truth. In fact he was so good looking and smart and hardworking
that when he told people he was tank born they just didn't know what to say. Maud didn't like
him to tell people, though. It made her uncomfortable.

The only way his background made him really unusual was that he didn't have any family.
Everyone on Pyrite had more brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts and
grandmothers and grandfathers than they could really keep track of. Walter didn't have
anyone, except once he'd got married he had Maud's relations, who accepted him into the
connection fairly graciously, considering. Now Maud was a Delgarno, or at least her mother
was, and her father was a Li, and you'd think that would be enough relations for anyone, and
that's what Maud told her daughter Arabetsy when she was getting old enough to be asking
questions.

Walter's lack of family made him surprisingly fond of Maud's family traditions. He especially
loved all the holidays when they'd get together in each other's houses and eat. One year it
was their turn to host the Landing Day dinner for the whole clan. Walter was helping Maud
cook in advance, and she asked him to cut the end off the ham for her.

"How much should I cut off?" he asked.

Maud hesitated, and Walter wondered if this was something that everyone knew except tank
kids. "Oh, about ten centimetres, honey," she replied.

He cut the end off in a jiffy with his monofilament saw, and as he gave the ham to his wife he
asked, "Why do you do that?"

"What?" she asked, busily sticking silverburrs on sticks.