"Timothy Zahn - A Coming of Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

Abruptly, she couldn't bear to sit still anymore. Getting to her feet, she looked around the lounge. A
few others were still there, but they were all girls she knew only casually. No one she would be
comfortable talking to... and, actually, she didn't really feel like talking, anyway. Stepping to the
room's French doors, she opened them and walked out onto the balcony.

For a wonder, the wide ledge was deserted. Leaning on the railing, Lisa gazed down into the hive's
landscaped courtyard, picking out figures moving around in the dim light. Above, the night was
coming on rapidly, with only a small patch of blue still showing through the trees where the sun had
gone down. Here and there she could see the distant specks of other kids flying about, a few off by
themselves but most in groups of three or more. A faint giggle reached her along the breeze, adding
that much more to her sense of frustration and loneliness. In the west the smaller of Tigris's moons,
Sumer, was rising higher, and she had a sudden urge to go and chase it. Glancing around quickly,
she stepped back to the building's wall and teeked herself straight up. Technically, flying off of
balconies was forbidden, but preteens were generally allowed to get away with it as long as they
made sure younger kids didn't see them. A hundred meters above the hive she leveled off and headed
west.

The evening air, warm enough when one was stationary, was rather chilly when passed through at
forty kilometers an hour, and Lisa wished momentarily she'd stopped by her room first to pick up a
sweater. But the sheer exhilaration of flight quickly drove such thoughts from her mind. She passed
the other kids without pausing; passed the outskirts of Barona itself; and within a few minutes she
was over the woodlands surrounding the city, as isolated from the world as it was possible to get.
She'd come out here often lately, as if distance alone would let her escape the pressing reality of
Transition....

For a long time she simply playedтАФgames of speed and altitude she'd enjoyed as a young girl, and
the more daring tricks of free fall and spinning spiral that had once won a brand-new preteen the
admiration of both her peers and even some of her elders. Time and again she soared high above the
woodlands surrounding Barona and let herself drop, relying more on instinct than on the dimly seen,
dark gray-on-black treetops to judge when to pull out of her dive. The hard knot of bitterness
underlying her sport she did her best to ignore.

Finally, the tension within her was exhausted, and she leveled out. Flying westward toward Rand
and the Tessellate Mountains, she fixed her gaze on the rising moon and tried to sort out the tangled-
yarn pattern of her thoughts.

She didn't mind the idea of being an adult; of that much she was pretty sure. People like Gavra
Norward and the architects she knew from her building work had shown her that growing up didn't
have to mean loss of all power, that being an adult didn't mean being a nobody. The attitude such
thoughts implied still bothered her, thoughтАФshe didn't like to admit that having power over other
people was so important to her. But I don't want to push people around, not really, she decided after
a moment of conscience-poking. I just don't want them pushing me around. And that, she realized
suddenly, was what she feared most about Transition. She would be beginning school exactly equal
with everyone else her age. A new situation, with new rules and relationshipsтАФand no teekay to


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A Coming of Age